‘What’s the time, Syl?’ I said.

‘It’s not late,’ he said, sliding his hand down my leg. Oh God, now he was going to be affectionate. What a fool you are sometimes, Lili. It was late. It was a bit too late to tell him to keep his hands to himself.

‘Tell me about Abishag the…tell me about Margaret,’ I said.

He took his hand off my leg and put it on the back of my neck. I suppose he thought that was a more respectable place if we were going to discuss his forthcoming marriage. He’d always been peculiar about women. He fell in love the way people, who are run-down, catch colds. Yes, I do it too, but not all the time. He was prone to it and he did it all the time. Here a thought struck me. What—since Syl had such appalling taste in women—did he see in me? I reminded myself that I was calling the shots here. I had instigated this meeting. It was quite possible that he saw nothing in me at all. I had never thought I should find comfort in picturing myself as undesirable. You see, the twists that you can take once you get off the beaten track. Syl was much too stupid to see the flame in me. I was inviolate. Oh, Lilith.

‘You see, Lili,’ he said, ‘she has these banked-down fires in her...’ I was amazed at my percipience. There I was thinking about fires and there was Syl talking about them. ‘She’s been kept down by her mother all her life,’ he went on. ‘She has a warm nature and she’s capable of passion, but it’s all been diverted into other channels. Into mother love...’ I thought if Margaret loved her mother I was the cat’s granny, but I didn’t say anything. ‘In her,’ he said, ‘it’s as if the river was running backwards towards the source. She’s got this sense of duty towards her mother because her father abandoned her and that makes it difficult for her to show emotion. But it’s there,’ he said with conviction.

I thought—oh nuts, Syl—but I only said ‘What her?’

‘What?’ said Syl.

‘What her?’ I asked. ‘You speak of too many hers. There’s the her who’s running backwards, and the her who was abandoned and the her who can’t show emotion. What her?’

‘You know perfectly well,’ said Syl. He’d always been given to this sort of thing. He’d tried it on me once. It was a kind of guard against rejection. As yet another female turned him down he’d worry at the matter like a rat in a dry well until he’d rationalized his loss and restored his amour propre. I had once said to him ‘Oh, do put all that away, Syl’—or something on those lines—and he’d said my reason for saying it was that my mother had neglected me. The reason I’d said it was that I was waiting for somebody else to come and spend the night, and the reason he was coming to spend the night wasn’t because my mother had neglected me, I can tell you. Try explaining that to Syl.