‘Who told you that?’ I asked.

‘I did,’ said Lili. ‘At one point I was being very bad about relationships and Robert said I should be psychoanalysed. That is very expensive and we were short of money, so I simply asked myself what this psychoanalyst would say. He would say "Lili," he would say to me, "as a child, Lili, it has become evident from what you have told me that you were sometimes spoiled and sometimes locked in your room. This has made it difficult for you to form relationships." Then he would say, "That will be ten guineas. You must come back tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, and the next until you can make perfect relationships"—like perfect omelettes—and we would have been penniless and that would have been worse than the bad relationships. Don’t you agree?’

‘What bad relationships?’ I asked. ‘You’ve been married for donkey’s years.’

‘I don’t really have a relationship with Robert,’ explained Lili, ‘so it can’t be bad. But with other people—I tend to squeeze them like lemons until I have squeezed out all the juice, and then I fling them aside.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘Not women,’ said Lili. ‘I have good relationships with women. Only men.’

I said I saw very little value in paying out good money in order to have more mutually satisfactory affairs, and Lili said that of course I was right: that was what she had thought herself. She said she also thought that Robert was unlike a lemon, and more like a potato, in that he was not susceptible to squeezing.

Most people seek to be reassuring when health, whether bodily or mental, is under discussion, so I said that that was fortunate, that Robert’s potato-like quality must represent strength, solidarity and endurance. Lili said nothing as I spoke and, since she did not deny what I was saying, after a while I fell to thinking—as I had sometimes thought before—that words could be used as the stuff of illusion: that, marshalled in a certain order so that they made at least grammatical sense, they could be used to silence the dissident, awe the credulous, inflame the mob to violence and almost always dazzle the unintelligent; that words were not like bones, a basic and necessary structure, but more like the inessential finery which people flaunt to gain a better conceit of themselves and impress their fellows.

I said, ‘I talk too much. I suppose it’s because I’m so often alone.’

‘You don’t talk too much,’ said Lili.

‘I sometimes talk a lot of nonsense,’ I said, ‘but then so do we all’

‘I rather like it,’ said Lili, ‘when very dim people start giving me advice.’

I wondered, with some amusement, whether she meant me. But she went on.

‘Monica does it,’ she said. ‘Monica’s always passing round advice like cucumber sandwiches. Awful, homespun advice. I find it entertaining. Birdbrained old Monica holding forth on world affairs! It’s as though the canary had started spouting Carlyle. Very boring stuff, but the circumstance is remarkable. I suppose very stupid people are too stupid to know they’re stupid.’