When I tore myself away from it, we went and sat down on the settee and kissed in some discomfort. After a while he said that perhaps we might go up and lie on the bed, and I said that perhaps we might, so we went up to the bedroom. But it was useless, I could not bring myself to think about it at all.

“What’s the matter?” he said after a while. “What’s the matter with me? What have I done? Don’t you want me to make love to you, Emma?”

“Not particularly,” I said, turning over and lying on my back to stare at the ceiling. “Not particularly, to tell you the truth.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “All that washing up, and I can see that there’s a button off your shirt, and I know that any minute now you’re going to ask me to sew it on for you, aren’t you? Be honest, tell me, you were, weren’t you?”

“Well, it had crossed my mind. But not immediately, of course. Not now.”

“No. After.”

“Yes, I suppose so. After.”

I started to laugh.

“Oh well,” I said, “at least you admitted it. If you hadn’t admitted it, that would have been that. Tell me, Wyndham, what makes you think that I’m any better at sewing buttons on than you are?”

“Well, you’re a woman. More practice.”

“You could start practicing now. Then you wouldn’t have to take women to bed with you in order to get your buttons sewn on. I’ll give you a lesson.”

“Don’t be so hard on me, Emma. I love you. For what that’s worth.”

“I don’t even know what it means.”

“It doesn’t mean much. But it means something.”

“I’m not really hard on you. I love you, too, in my own small way.”

“Do you? Do you think about me?”

“When I’ve time. No, I really mean it, I do think about you. But I have other things to do. I’m not free. I would be loving you if I could manage it. Or I think I would.”

“No you wouldn’t. All you want is to be driven round in a nice big car and eat avocado pears and prawn cocktails and be stared at by men in provincial restaurants.”

“Now you’re being hard on me. And anyway, that’s not all I want, I don’t think it’s all I want. It’s just that I connect love—well, lying on beds and so forth—I connect that with babies. And being tired. And wanting to go to sleep. And I don’t want all that, I just want to have a good time.”

“But when you were a girl, Emma, you used to have a good time. You wouldn’t have thought twice about a thing like this.”