How hopeless and ludicrous everything was: the seas of incomprehension, the misunderstandings that could never be cleared up because we seemed not only to speak different languages but to inhabit different countries. If I had told him I wished he was dead he would have seen this as a palimpsest of desire, but I only wished that he wasn’t there.

I had wished Nour dead because he would not stay with me, and that had been a palimpsest of desire.

‘I’ve been frightened of cows ever since,’ said Mrs Monro, and I thought—her memories don’t even have the moth.

When Lili came back from Scotland with a bottle of whisky and a biscuit box emblazoned with the tartan of the clan Campbell I told her that I was frightened of growing old.

‘Well, it’s that or die,’ said Lili. ‘You might as well hang around for as long as you can.’

I was disproportionately pleased to see her. She had the effect of an open window on a frowsty room, ice in a lukewarm drink, wind on a sullen sea. She was free of the shaming curbs of expedient morality. She would never smell of milk, or the urine of infants, or laundry-steam rising from linen indiscriminately washed. She wasn’t a mother, and if she was a wife, she was, by conventional standards, a gloriously bad one.

‘Did you have a good time?’ my mother asked Robert as I whispered to Lili that I found old age unclean and a disgrace. When I was as old as Lili Syl would be an old, old man, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t want to think about it.

‘You don’t have to go along with it,’ said Lili sitting down. I realized that I could have her full attention as long as I caught her interest, and I could only do this by telling the truth, for she could no more be bothered with the niceties of drawing-room small-talk than could a fox.

‘You must wear false eyelashes,’ she said, ‘and very, very expensive scent, and you must never, never sit on a park bench with a person of your own age.’

‘Is that all?’ I asked. I liked this foolish image, which was so different from Mrs Monro.

‘And you must try not to grow worse,’ said Lili. ‘Morality lapses as you get older and nothing seems to matter any longer.’ She sounded serious and I knew that, this being so, she was talking about herself.

‘I always wanted to die young and now it’s too late,’ she said. ‘My mother died at the age I am myself and I never thought I’d be older than her. I was quite prepared to die—without giving it too much thought, you understand—and suddenly I find I’ve got up steam and I’ve puff-puffed past the station labelled "Death" and the track lies all before me, unsignposted.’

I saw myself chugging along a short track: a little side-shunting labelled ‘Marriage’ with unyielding buffers at the beginning and the end—cutting off the track and all the future. So I didn’t say anything.