I cleared the table and gave dog a bit of mackerel skin. It was gone, gobbled up, before I could turn.

‘Dog,’ I said, ‘you men are all the same.’

Now I could feel an uneasy rage curdling somewhere behind my breastbone. Not with Syl: with somebody else, somebody I had almost forgotten. With my eyes closed I imagined this man standing to the left of me, and in my mind 1 swung out with all my strength with my left arm and felled him. Then there were other men and I moved along and I felled them all. There were tears in my eyes, and I knew what I was mourning. It was my lost virginity. This realization brought me to what sense I had remaining to me, for after all it was rather late to worry about that now. Like one of the seal people, the mermaid or the fairy wife, I felt I had sacrificed my birthright to benefit mortal men and I yearned to return to the sea, to the lake, to my element. Three blows from a man were enough to send these mythical creatures back to the halls of their fathers, and I had put up with more than that. I went and sat down in the sitting-room and lit a cigarette. I got up, poured myself a glass of brandy and sat down again feeling dissolute.

Then Syl came back.

‘You weren’t long,’ I said.

‘Margaret’s tired,’ Syl said.

‘Did she like the present?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘You don’t sound very sure.’

‘I’m sure. She liked it.’

I was silent, for Syl was in a bad mood.

I thought of King David. They used to bring him virgins to sleep in his bed and warm his old bones. Old, cold, bones. Once, in the poor farmhouses, some farmers’ families would only have one bedroom and they would all have to sleep together. My mind was like a disobedient dog: it would go off without approval or permission and roll in matters that I wished to know nothing of. It went on sniffing and scratching at the oubliette where the subject of incest lay concealed until I thought I should go mad. The dairy women had held the same biblical superstition that the young should never lie beside the old, for their vitality would all be drained away: they would fade and wither, while the old would rise, rosy-cheeked, with renewed vigour and go on living. I could not, at the moment, imagine why they should want to. I could not, at the moment, see any virtue in living whatsoever.

Yet another morning had come round. Life was like some debilitating, hypnotic game composed of endless repetition: some cosmic fruit-machine—mindless, mechanical, like the monsters in the pub by the river. The mere speeding succession of days was enough to unhinge the reason. I longed to be back—at home, where the days had seemed to flow, not fall in, one upon another, with a jangle and a flash, and be gone again.