‘The thing about marriage,’ I said, too loudly, for being made nervous also made me bad-tempered, ‘is that it must be exclusive.’ Don’t ask me why I said that. I wasn’t thinking about the wedding. I wasn’t thinking about anything much. It just popped out. Nobody else was saying anything after all, so it was good of me to bring a little cultured conversation to this breakfast table. I’m not being truthful, I said it to please Robert. Robert didn’t look pleased. He didn’t look anything except like a man eating a boiled egg on a winter’s morning, while Monica looked contemptuous. I don’t think she meant to look like that for she hadn’t got enough brains to be contemptuous. It was only her expression but it was irritating. I went on. ‘We learn nothing from promiscuity,’ I said, ‘just that there’s very little to choose between one man and another.’ I often talk like that when I’m drunk, but seldom first thing in the morning. I was more shaken than I’d realized. Robert had disappeared behind The Times. Oh, damn. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. I was getting everything wrong. ‘In order to understand ourselves,’ I said, making one of those honest attempts to clarify matters which led you further into the mud, ‘we need to understand each other, and to do that we must live together for a long time. Exclusively.’ Even I could see that this didn’t mean anything. I knew what I meant but I couldn’t seem to express it. I meant it was better to understand one thing properly, using one example (well, all right one man, one husband) rather than go flying round exploring the possibilities of hundreds of them. I believed that. Robert lowered The Times and looked at me. Monica spoke: ‘What have you learned, Lili?’ she asked.

Great heavens—she was being contemptuous.

I floundered. I felt like a person dancing on a river bank when, lo, the bit she’s dancing on breaks away and there she is hopping about like a lunatic on a lump of sinking turf. The way of the entertainer is fraught with danger—with misunderstandings and the risk of failure. And now Robert was looking at me. I began to get really cross. I lost the thread of my argument. Anyway, what did I care? ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it obvious? All you learn from sleeping around is that men are much the same.’

Robert spoke: ‘So are women,’ he said.

I was furious. I know it was my own fault for talking philosophically over breakfast; for saying the sort of things that are normally only said in smoke-filled rooms after dark, after dinner, after several bottles of something or other. Nevertheless he had no right to say what he said; to humiliate me before Monica.

‘I’m not like other women,’ I said. ‘I’m different.’ Perhaps it was the cold and the greyness that were making me unsubtle—making me vulnerable. Making me sound ordinary and—yes—making me sound like other women.