Then when I was pregnant with Syl I had stopped smoking again. I dreaded the birth of this child. I had not before felt such grief, such pity for the as yet unborn. It was like the grief one feels for the dead. It was worse, for even if there is no God and no abode to share with him, at least the dead are past all pain, while those who are yet to be born must learn to live with us: with our frailty and our cruelty. They must learn in time, in order to survive, to be like us. When Syl was very young I was afraid—more of, than for, him—terrified of the beloved’s capacity for pain; and as he grew older I indulged him, trying to protect him from his human heritage. A mistake.

Memories are like possessions: furniture, ornaments. Some are always in the room of your mind, some decayed, some lost; and some are there on the walls—of no further profit or use and never to be shared or revealed. Only you yourself are aware that the small hidden image gleaming barely perceptibly through the dust represents the hinge and focus of your life. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter and God alone knows what you think you mean.

I don’t know why I said all that. I have never spoken of it to anyone. It was the taste of cigarette smoke that brought it back—more potent than any little biscuit, than any egg sandwich. I never did finish the whole of Proust. There wasn’t any point after Jack died. Once I was alone I had no need of feints and ruses and avenues of escape since I could be solitary in truth and fact, not just in metaphor. Poor Jack. He was, while a stupider, also a better person than me, in the sense that he was more truly human. I had a capacity for, and knowledge of, evil, while Jack’s misdemeanours seemed somehow on a par with the failings of the dog. Having said that, I do not think I could construct a worse insult if I tried from now until the end of time, and I am glad that Jack is dead and beyond harm for I might once have been angry enough to tell him so. Presumably the offensiveness lies in the nature of evil, and now I am con fused. It does not seem to me that I think less clearly than I did, but I get tired more easily and I lose the thread. I was thinking of humanity as a combination of beast and angel. It is the beasts who are sinless and it was the brightest angel in Heaven who turned his face from the light. It is the angel in us who is capable of sin; the poor beast merely seeks gratification. I feel I should apologize to Jack, and then I feel—what the hell, this is nothing but the truth. Except, of course, that it isn’t and humanity is yet another order of being, more complex than we can ever know.