And so they went on, pointlessly, messily. As I say, I had heard it all before, but I nevertheless found something touching and pathetic in David’s assertion of his own positive wonderful self: poor David, who has no more self than a given quantity of water and who is always trying to contain his own flowing jelly-like shapelessness in some stem mould or confine because he is, I think, afraid of the aimlessness of his own undirected violence. I watched him as he talked: his handsomeness, I now see, consists almost entirely in the marvellous threatening smoky parallel between the line of his brow and the line of his eye, and if I constrict my attention to this area of his face I can almost revive in myself that first original passion. In fact, so effectively did I persuade myself on to his side that I eventually got up and said I would go and make some spaghetti as it was past nine and nobody had yet eaten anything except those cocktail biscuits at the reception. David looked surprised and said that it was very kind of me: he doubtless thought I was undergoing my usual silent fury. So I went off into the kitchen to chop up onions. As I chopped, I thought about the discussions that I used to hear as a child in my father’s house, about God and the Church and the interpretation of curious grammatical construction in theological writings. Those discussions, it is true, had had a fine and detailed precision, but it had always astonished me that people had found it possible to talk for so long about the structure of the Trinity when it seemed far from clear to me that God was One or indeed Any, let alone Three. It was that, I think, amongst other things, that started me off on my passion for facts and for typed lists about the Angevin empire. I wanted to know what could be known. And now I seemed to have ended up in a society even further removed from facts than my father’s. At least Athanasius and Arius had existed, which was in itself interesting, even if what they had existed for was far from certain. But what was the theatre itself but one huge irrational sham, made for fantasy and fiction, not for fact? To me it hardly seemed to touch reality at any point; and yet it existed, like that wardrobe in my bedroom it existed, and indeed, it existed sufficiently to provide my bread and butter, my onions and garlic and my tomatoes in tins.