In those days I slept a great deal, and sometimes I dreamed: not of what had happened but of emptiness and occasionally of chaos when the tenuous mosaic that was life shattered into its constituent parts and whirled away into unknown infinities. I would wake sleep-logged and weary, and every new day was dull. After a while it seemed to me amusing that such preparations as a wedding involve should surround the plain, pale husk that was me and that no one had commented on this incongruity. Even my mother had closed her eyes and ceased to speak of bridal nerves, and my groom, who meant as little to me as his mother’s dog, was just as he had always been.

I was trapped, not only by the ordering of the caterers, the priest and my mother’s new hat, but by an impotence of spirit. Sometimes in the evenings I would hear myself laughing, and the sound was like wind passing over an empty vessel. One day I overheard my mother speaking to a friend, or rather to an acquaintance, since she was clearly deemed worthy only of instant or cliché speech. My mother said casually, ‘Oh, the honeymoon will soon put the roses back in her cheeks.’ And for a moment despair was overwhelmed by something more lively: by a sensation of such disgust that for just that one moment I was almost galvanized into rebellion. My mother had intended no lewdness, but the connotations of her remark had made me feel a greater, more immediate sense of defilement than that which I already experienced. Then I shut my mind to the picture that her words had conjured, for after all—what did it matter? My mother had lived my life until half a year ago when I had so briefly lived my own and in the process destroyed it. Now I was to be given to Syl. I had nothing to lose. For Syl I felt no sympathy, since if he was fool enough to want me he deserved none. In the course of time I would die and then it would all be over.

We went to the theatre and to dinner and I believe I must have talked and, as I have said, I know I sometimes laughed and I think no one ever knew that I was empty of everything except perhaps madness.