So we stood side by side before the stars with nothing to do, nothing to say. We were so still an onlooker might well have thought us starstruck.

At last I took my heavy hand away from her heavy shoulder, leaving it with a little pat.

“Too many stars make me dizzy.”

I went quickly to the door, switched on the light, went round the lobby and all three rooms switching on lights, even the light on the balcony. We must have blazed out over the valley.

“You can stop looking now, dammit! Final curtain.”

She turned round then, not looking at me but at the door.

“I guess so.”

“I’ll tell Rick when he comes back that you went early. Headache. Altitude.”

“Went?”

“When he comes back from the—”

She blushed vividly from breast to hair and it was only then, I swear, that I saw the pattern of their collusion. Her voice thinned to a little girl’s voice.

“No—I—thank you for having me.”

She ran towards the door, running clumsily as if she weren’t seeing straight. Suddenly I felt as I might have felt, yes, might have felt but never did, for Emily.

“Mary Lou—”

She delayed, half-turned, and red in the face. As if she were put back to her teens—the day before yesterday—she raised her right hand to shoulder height and wiggled the fingers at me.

‘“Bye for now.”

After that, without any help, she got herself through the door of the sitting-room and through the lobby and the outside door and—the carpet on the floor of the short corridor was too thick to let me hear if she ran or walked or staggered along it.

What did he expect? What was the, as we say in our jargon, projected scenario? Did he think we would fence archly, and she, girlishly, dodge round the table and say, no, Wilf, no, not unless you sign that paper? Or was she to crawl up me odalisquelike to plead with her lips pouted? Or was she to agree in a matter-of-fact way like a noseblow and then I, obligated, would sign, saying, take it, it’s what you want.

Thank you for having me! The pathetic idiocy, the vulnerability of the girl, the gross, insulting imperceptivity of the man! Yet he had not been so very far out after all. Had that skin been warm and given back the faintest signal, how different it would all have been! Neither of us, critic and author, we knew nothing about people or not enough. We knew about paper, that was all. The poor girl was the human one. She didn’t know how to do it. But then—I didn’t know how to do it! He didn’t know how to offer it. Pimp, client and whore, all we three needed the assistance of a professional. I stood in the blazing room, behind me the dark oblong of the window with its quenched stars. I stared at Rick’s paper on the table, then at the card hung on the outer door, Avis aux MM les clients. I thought of Rick lying discreetly in bed, perhaps snoring gently so as to make his wife’s return something neither of them need take notice of or comment on. But she would shake him out of his snores and assure him that nothing had happened, nothing at all except that Mr Barclay had put his hand on her left shoulder, yes, shoulder, and she knew he wanted her only he hadn’t done anything but taken his hand away again and he hadn’t said much, nothing had happened, nothing at all, would he hold her, please, please, make love to her, she was so, so soiled and he must never, never ask her again—