“Surely you ought to be keeping an eye on The Clandestine Marriage, oughtn’t you? With so little time to go.”

“Is it a permanent trait in your character, this desire to tell other people their duty? Or do you just do it to me?”

“All right then, next Wednesday.”

“I’ll pick you up at your house. Is that convenient? We can go somewhere in the car. Do you like cars?”

“Yes. I like cars.”

He looked at me thoughtfully, and I as steadily regarded him. I think we were both very happy at that moment, for we were both regarding, with a little awe, the unpredictable. Then he said:

“Do you want to go now? I’ll let you out through the front door if you like, and then we won’t get mixed up with all those people.”

And he led me back along the corridor, through the dark deserted foyer to the glass doors of the main entrance, and just as he put his key in the lock the lights all went on again. We blinked at each other in that bright and empty festive place. I was a little stunned: he looked older, more formidable in the light.

“Perhaps you could tell David,” I said as I paused on the threshold, “that I’ve gone home.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Wyndham, and I walked off into the rain.

On the way home I began to wonder if I had not been extremely silly: my sense of muted triumph and exhilaration gave way to an anxiety that at first formulated itself in terms of the doubtful wisdom of going out with another man alone. It was a fact that since my marriage I had been out with nobody but the most harmless friends of my childhood: I had not had time. There would have been no point in saying no, and yet I felt that I had involved myself in disaster by saying yes. It was not merely that our appointment had a distinct flavour of the clandestine, nor that Wyndham Farrar himself seemed to be a dangerous undertaking, though both these factors were involved. It was more that the way I had said yes, the helpless, rash, needing way I had been unable to refuse, laid me open to all sorts of conjectures about myself and my position. I thought of David, and Flora, and Joseph, and myself, and with each step I realized more clearly that for the last few months, for the last year, I personally, I myself, the part of me that was not a function and a smile and a mother, had been curled up and rotten with grief and patience and pain. I walked quicker and quicker as myself stretched and put out damp, bony wings. I hated myself. I did not want to give myself a chance, I would rather have said no to that invitation and concentrated on my Liverpool teapots and my even temper.