“Emma,” he said with that Welsh double consonant, and as he spoke the light above went out. It must, I suppose have been midnight, or whatever hour they choose to extinguish the street lamps in that urban district. In any case, it had the strangest effect, that sudden darkness, as of sinking together into some great depth. We moved together: I think that we only took each other’s hands, though I have a memory of some more shocking union.

And that was it. He did walk back to Tonbridge that night, or so he has always asserted, though his stamina has never been as remarkable as his capacity for rash assertions. Whatever he did, we parted after five minutes, with addresses, telephone numbers and names carefully inscribed. I said that I had to go home, which was not strictly true, but I was, as I had also said, expected. And for a long time that was all I knew about him, his address, his telephone number and his name. I was not interested in the rest. When he tried to tell me about himself, I would stop listening: I did not want to know. All I wanted was this feeling of terror with which he inspired me. With him, I felt that I was on the verge of some unknown and frightful land, black desert, white sand, huge rocky landscapes, great jungles of ferns. Indeed, such personal attributes as I against my will discovered in him I rather disliked: he seemed in himself to be a stock character, Welsh, pugnacious, dark, small, in childhood religion-ridden and now ostentatiously keen on drink and women, and with all this an actor, a selfish, drama-besotted actor. In cold blood, in bed alone or drinking my morning coffee, I was stunned by the unlikelihood of it: my rarefied, connoisseur’s self and this self-evident cliché of a man?