“I’m sorry, Emma, it was very selfish of me, I didn’t realize how boring it would be for you here. Or if I did realize, I didn’t care.”

“Oh,” I said, “it wasn’t that, it wasn’t only that.”

“It really was Wyndham then, was it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know anything about Wyndham. He’s gone now anyway, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s gone. Emma, I’m sorry about Sophy.”

“Oh, that’s all right. Don’t bother about that. Fair’s fair. You had to have something, didn’t you?”

“It seems we both had to have something. It seems that’s how we are.”

“I wouldn’t mind, I wouldn’t mind at all, but my whole life seems to be so trivial, David, just one domestic accident after another, just one mistake after another. Why can’t I make things important any more, why couldn’t I manage to make Wyndham important?”

“Wasn’t he?”

“Well, not really, was he? He’ll just go off to London now and find some other girl and fall in love with her and take her out to dinner and tell her lovely stories and get upset. I feel sorry for most people, but not for him, he’s all right. And I don’t care. Not at all.”

“Yes. I daresay it’s just about the same with Sophy. She’s got her eye on Neville already, did you know?”

“Not really? I thought that Neville and Viola—”

“No, Viola’s gone off him recently. Her fiancé came up last weekend, he’s finished work on that film, whatever it’s called, that epic thing in Greece, and she’s gone right off Neville. Sophy’s bloody quick off the mark, I’ll say that for her; she may not be an intellectual giant in other respects, but she can smell a change of heart from a mile away.”

“Do you think she’d have a nice time with Neville?”

“I don’t see why not. I like him, don’t you? I say, Emma, talking about epic films, do you know who wrote to me this morning? Rockie Goldenberg. They’re doing some great sea thing in the East Indies, some story by Smollett, he said, and he wondered if I’d be interested in it. How would you like to go to the East Indies? It would make a change, wouldn’t it?”

“I should think it’s just like Hereford,” I said, and started to laugh.

“Oh God, you’re crazy,” he said, and began to kiss my arm, and I lay there laughing and sneezing and saying, “I love you, David,” for quite a long time, not particularly because I meant it or felt it, but because I knew that in view of the facts, it must be true. When I stopped, he said:

“What’s so funny about the East Indies?” and I said: