I said, ‘Hallo, my darling’, and he said, ‘I’m leaving you, Lili.’ So he was a coward. He couldn’t have told me when we were alone. He had to wait until we were surrounded by strangers. Never mind that I knew all these people. They were strangers now. They looked at me without embarrassment. They didn’t love me now I’d been repudiated.

‘You’re a hashshâsh, Lili,’ said my husband. He had lived long in my country to learn to be so cruel. ‘Go and live with the Old Man of the Mountains,’ he said. He was drunk.

***

I went to Celestine’s but she was out, so I smoked by myself. I’d always used a little hashish. A lot of my countrymen did. It was not so harmful to the liver as drink. Robert disapproved of it in the same way that he disapproved of me ‘sponging’—just because it was foreign. He would borrow money from people he didn’t like, and sometimes he drank until he fell over. But that was all right.

Yes, sometimes hashish made me indiscreet and do things I would not otherwise have done, but does not drink also have this effect? Yes, it does. Robert was irrational and I was angry with him. I didn’t mind being rebuked if I was really in the wrong, but he didn’t know I was. He was being needlessly cruel and it wasn’t fair.

I picked up the telephone and before I could speak I found I was sobbing. There were tears in the telephone. I never weep. Not usually. It was the cold of this accursed country that had weakened my resistance. ‘Oh, I’m so unhappy,’ I said.

There was another side to Syl. A side I haven’t told you about. I always knew he had this other side, but I had never had to rely on it. I had despised him for it. It was a womanly side; a gentle, loving, worrying side. He would wrinkle his forehead with concern and lean over and take your hand. It was anaphrodisiac, but so comforting. He stayed with me until I stopped crying and then we talked. After a while we finished talking about me. There are limits to what can be said about me. So we talked about Syl. I found I rather liked him, I was quite fond of him. I remembered that once upon a time I had faintly loved him before I became aware of this womanly side. Now I lay against the warmth of that womanly side and felt comforted. The ironies of life. We talked for hours, and we only talked. We might have been in the zenana.