“I don’t think so,” said David. “I just don’t think so. If you’re not a Henry James then it won’t do you any good to think about him, and if you are then you won’t need to. I don’t think there is a higher ideal than myself, personally. I’m quite prepared to think that I’m the best actor in the country. In fact, it’s necessary to think so; all it means is that I’m the best one of me that there is.”

“You are the best,” I said, and nibbled at the ends of his fingers.

“You wouldn’t think so,” he said, “from the way that you treat me.”

“What do you mean? I gave you and your horrid friends a lot of nice supper, didn’t I?

“That’s not what I mean,” he said, tightening his grasp on my knuckles until it hurt.

“You won’t get anywhere by force,” I said, pulling away.

“That’s the only way I do get anywhere,” he said. “I’ve had two children by force, haven’t I?”

“It’s legalized rape,” I said, and he let go my hand and turned over on his side, taking the sheets and blankets with him. And I turned my own thin spine towards him, and so we fell asleep.

5

THE next morning I gave Joseph his first bottle of cow’s milk. He drank it all, with far less fuss than he used to display when I fed him myself, so I was glad that the idea of weaning him had occurred to me. I was suddenly very anxious for my breasts to return from their tight, round, full inhuman globes to their usual small selves. I had had enough of maternity. I was sucked dry.

When I had finished with Joseph, I left him and his sister with Pascal and went into town to do the shopping. I had arranged to meet David at the theatre at lunchtime, and before I did so I intended to organize myself and this town. I was ready to walk for miles to find the right butcher and the right grocer. After an hour’s investigation, when I had fixed myself up with everything except a large tin of oil, I began to panic: it was a strange feeling to notice that I was so out of my depth, that there was nothing and no one in the town to which I could relate myself. With deprivation and a sense of loss I made my way to the nearest Wimpy Bar and ordered a cup of coffee, for the decor in these places is the same, the coffee tastes the same in Hereford as in London, and, who knows, they may have them, too, in Buenos Aires and Beirut. I felt at home there, as I feel in Marks and Spencers; or rather not at home, but unnoticed in the anonymous brightly painted delocalized calm. And there, sure enough, was a small group of actors, who had made their way there with the same birdlike instinct: all those who were not working that morning. In a week or two, in fact, they discovered another coffee bar, nearer to the old narrow streets where we lived, which had some pretension to an arty student life, and they took it over. They simply moved in. They did not drive everyone else out, because some remained to stare, but they must have ruined the place for its local longhaired personalities forever.