One day she was talking about love again. She said or I heard—that we should only fall in love once, that it was an experience of such profound significance that to repeat it would be to devalue it. This seemed to me so true that I couldn’t imagine why it was not universally acknowledged. Even in my limited experience I had seen people falling in and out of love, as though, soiled by sorrow and loss, they had to go in search of comfort from one used and lukewarm bath to another. The marriage service, I conceded, did insist on exclusivity, but clearly people other than myself were prone to not listening. It was sad for me that I had fallen in love with someone who did not love me, but it was not an experience I cared to repeat—for more and better reasons than the fear of pain. If it had been an illusion, then other illusions lay ahead, a hall of mirrors, a series of mirages. I had lost faith, not in God but in the carnal love which so preoccupied almost everyone I had ever known. How they talked and sang and wrote and thought about it, as though union with another were the entire purpose of existence. And how could they believe it when disillusion, of one sort or another, sooner or later was the almost invariable result? Perhaps it was not I but the other riders who were hell-bent on the wrong route. I was too unsure of myself to believe that this could be possible. Mother Joseph seemed utterly remote, her voice lost in the clamour of my mother’s voice, my mother’s certainty that marriage represented sanity, security, good behaviour in a dangerous world of hostile winds and people who were ‘not one of us’, talking to themselves. It couldn’t be that I was right, and while I yearned to return to a certainty I already knew, I heard only my mother’s voice, insisting, on one dead note, that she knew of what life should consist. All the other voices around me were saying the same and the distant peal of the convent bell mingling, not incongruously, with the cry from the minaret went unheeded.

When Lili stopped speaking I wished I could ask her to repeat what she had said, but already she was lighting a cigarette and talking about linen.

‘I’ve never seen the point of keeping piles of the stuff,’ she said. ‘It goes yellow if you keep it for too long and I don’t see how anyone can be expected to use fifty tablecloths even in a lifetime—not mucky-looking yellow ones. And where are you supposed to keep them all?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I already had a great many tablecloths in boxes with bows on. Presents from relations.

‘There’d be no room for one’s clothes,’ said Lili, ‘not with all those tablecloths and napkins.’

‘The nuns have three habits,’ I said. ‘One to wear, one in the wash and one in the wardrobe.’