I look back on that first outing, and it has a strange pickled charm, like a fly in amber, or a sour black walnut, or a dead brown rose that I once saw trapped in a block of cut glass in an antique shop in Venice. Wyndham did not call for me at my house: he thought better of it, and picked me up at an anonymous meeting point by a post office. I liked his car: it was a maroon Jaguar, and it seemed to be made inside of solid polished wood. He took me to a restaurant somewhere in Wales. I had never in my life been in Wales before, and it was a satisfactory slap in the eye for David, to be there without him. We drank a lot and stared at each other over the food, and he told me many stories about his life: he told me about women, all sorts of women, and I liked him for the way that he seemed to have been ready to have a go at anything. His stories all had a hit-and-miss nature, and the naive and ready way that he rushed into them, willing to capture my attention by any extravagance, reminded me of myself in those days when I would tell perfect strangers that my mother was dying, simply in order to compel their attention. And he compelled mine, for it was not a sense of pathos that he aroused, but rather an unwilling admiration for his perpetual readiness.

I myself was far from ready: for so long I had been effacing myself from any serious sexual attention that I had almost lost the knack. I am not saying that I am one of these women who when married lose all interest in their appearance and in the admiration of others. On the contrary, my appearance has always obsessed me, but there is a difference between desiring to attract attention in the street or at a first night and being able to sustain it through an evening à deux. I did not dare at first to take the risk. I hedged, I did not have the courage to follow up my excursions nor the self-absorption to maintain, once struck, a fine attitude of arm or head or eye. But gradually I began to feel the old pulls and pressures. And I found that I was not bad at it at all: I knew that I looked imposing, and eventually my conversation began to regain a little of the wideness and sharpness that I had for years been attempting to soften and enclose. I told my stories, too, and not this time, if I remember rightly, about my mother. He was not the kind of man to shy away from provocation.