“I remember the first time I fell in love. I was seventeen, eighteen, perhaps.” We settle to hear Roger’s story. Even Duncan looks round from the blaze. “It was a woman I had seen many times before, without incident. Then one day, as I passed her in the street, I noticed a curious expression on her face. Her eyes were lit up, almost belligerent. She looked both pleased with herself and as if she were searching for something—as if she had just eaten a delicious meal and was still famished. After that, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I kept imagining those devouring eyes turned on me. By the time I saw her again it was too late, she was veiled in my fantasy. I could no longer see her as she was. I was hopelessly in love, yet it was my illusion about her that made me fall, rather than anything she said or did.” Roger’s words tail into silence. We each sit thinking about our experiences of love. Clive is the first to speak.

“There is a kind of illusion. But I don’t believe the illusion is without truth. There has to be something in the person you fall in love with that kindles the illusion, as you call it. Some quality you see and respond to, something that merits all the feelings you lavish upon them.”

Duncan groans. “You’re making it too abstract! Of course it’s both those things—your own intrinsic nature and the way you perceive the other person, the way what you see dovetails with your own character. But there are also raw emotions—hopes, frustrations, needs . . .”

Clive raises himself to a sitting position. “I for one would never go to bed with someone I felt didn’t want to go to bed with me.”

“From the way I understand it,” Roger interrupts him, “the problem is not that Bunny doesn’t want to go to bed with Duncan. The problem is that Bunny also wants to go to bed with Barbara.”

“If there were only Barbara!” Duncan’s joke falls flat.

“Nevertheless”—Clive raises his pipe, reluctant to let go of his train of thought—“there has to be reciprocity. Otherwise one is laying oneself open to pain. It becomes degrading too—to want and want and never to have that want satiated. It eats away at you. In the end, you can’t even see how humiliating it is.”