Lili said, ‘You don’t imagine she’s a virgin, do you?’

My mother said, ‘Lili, you can’t be suggesting that Syl…’

And Lili said, ‘Darling, you can be so stupid sometimes.’

I went back upstairs, drank water in my hands from the bath tap and slept without dreaming.

At breakfast Lili for some reason spoke of fidelity, and I noted my mother as she went in and out with bread and boiling water, looking at her, not with the disapproval she reserved for me but with half-amused incredulity.

‘You see,’ said Lili, ‘there’s no real experience to be gained by promiscuity. We’re all called to understand ourselves, and to do this it’s necessary that we should understand one another, and this is only possible after a long while of living together. Leaping from bed to bed one learns nothing of any depth.’

‘What have you learned, Lili?’ asked my mother, at last sitting down with a cup of tea before her.

‘You challenge me,’ said Lili. ‘What have I learned? What have I learned of myself from learning through Robert...?’

Her husband lowered his paper and regarded her over the top of it.

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘But I’ve learned something. Isn’t it obvious that too many relationships will teach one nothing except that men are much alike?’

My mother sniffed. She had no very high opinion of men.

‘So are women,’ said Robert, turning back to the paper.

Lili looked affronted. ‘I am quite unlike other women,’ she observed.

‘Yes, you are,’ agreed her husband, and Lili smiled.

I thought that Robert loved her and wouldn’t mind her having lovers if she always came back to him. I wondered how it was possible to love many men when you had once loved one more than your immortal soul, and whether Lili had ever loved like that, or whether this was a torment saved for ridiculous people like myself.

‘What are you thinking about, Margaret?’ asked Lili.

‘I was thinking about what you were saying,’ I told her, while memories of Nour flooded my being so that I felt I couldn’t bear it but must instantly take that gleaming knife and open my body to let him out.

‘I sometimes talk nonsense,’ said Lili, ‘and sometimes I don’t. Mostly I don’t, but you must be careful when you listen to me.’

‘Don’t fill her head with a lot of nonsense,’ said my mother, rather oddly since, on the face of it, Lili had been recommending the path of virtue. I understood that my mother was ambivalent about marriage, bitter about her own experience of it while seeing no possible alternative for me, and that this must make things difficult for her.

She said that sensible people weren’t led astray by infatuation. She implied that only a fool could allow what was known as ‘love’ to enter into consideration in the matter. She stated that a wise woman would choose her mate on the basis of his qualities of character.