I was disposed to argue. ‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Syl won’t put up with all this nonsense,’ said my mother unwarily.

‘I’d better break the engagement now,’ I said, thinking my mother very foolish for not realizing that what appealed to Syl was my very paleness, my silence, my hostility, which he mostly construed as shyness, until I was unpleasant, and when I was unpleasant he took it as evidence of some depth in my feeling for him and found it sexually alluring. I had once or twice been goaded by his obtuseness into cruelty and he had wanted me more. I had been brought close to another sort of despair by my inability to draw blood: a cat with no claws and ineffectual teeth. Such a cat can seem only like a toy.

‘You can’t break the engagement now,’ said my mother.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘You know perfectly well,’ said my mother, not going into details.

In a sane world, I thought, we would have discussed the state of my feelings, debated whether I loved Syl sufficiently to commit the rest of my life to him, questioned my views on the institution of marriage, examined my mother’s motives in striving to introduce me into this state, have said something of some interest. But the cake had been ordered and that was that. There was no more to be said.

I was ill at ease in the mornings in those days. I would wake sour-mouthed, unwilling to get out of bed. My mother would bring me China tea and toast, succulent with butter, and I would eat it, knowing that afterwards I should feel sick and heavy. I would remember, against my will, the fragrance of coffee and hot bread, the energy that had possessed me so short a time ago, when I had felt supple as an eel, as powerful as a salmon, as sure and quiet and graceful as an owl. I would remember the sunlight that I had thought was like wealth, redeemed and transformed beyond the reach of cupidity, and the shadows that were not black but the colour of great half forgotten riches. My own country now seemed mean and meretricious, and my feet dashed awkwardly with the ground, jarring my body and jangling my bones so that the sound of my clumsy movements echoed hollowly against thin walls, and I was never at peace. So short a time ago? It seemed like aeons of time ago in an unimaginably distant world. My childhood felt nearer. The useless girl that I was might have grown without diversion, etiolated and bland like a stalk of grass under a stone, from those early days, represented still by the dolls and bears that lay on the cupboard shelves. The living creature that I had briefly been might never have existed. My mother would not have recognized her, and now I scarcely recognized her myself.

I was so cold.