‘Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.’

She stroked my hair. ‘I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you’ve learned, forget them. Forget that you’ve been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it.’

‘How shall I prove it?’

‘I can’t tell you what to do.’

The maze. Find your own way through and you shall win your heart’s desire. Fail and you will wander for ever in these unforgiving walls. Is that the test? I told you that Louise had more than a notion of the Gothic about her. She seemed determined that I should win her from the tangle of my own past. In her attic room was a print of the Burne-Jones picture titled Love and the Pilgrim. An angel in clean garments leads by the hand a traveller footsore and weary. The traveller is in black and her cloak is still caught by the dense thicket of thorns from which they have both emerged. Would Louise lead me so? Did I want to be led? She was right, I hadn’t thought about the hugeness of it all. I had some excuse; I was thinking about Jacqueline.

It was raining when I left Louise’s house and caught a bus to the Zoo. The bus was full of women and children. Tired busy women placating cross excitable kids. One child had forced her brother’s head into his satchel, scattering schoolbooks over the rubber floor, enraging her pretty young mother to the point of murder. Why is none of this work included in the Gross National Product? ‘Because we don’t know how to quantify it,’ say the economists. They should try catching a bus.

I got off at the main entrance to the Animal House. The boy in the booth was bored and alone. He had his feet propped on the turnstile, the wet wind pushing through his window and spatting his micro TV. He didn’t look at me as I leaned for shelter against a perspex elephant.

‘Zoo’s shuttin’ in ten,’ he said mysteriously. ‘No admin after five pm.’

A secretary’s dream; ‘No admin after five pm.’ That amused me for two seconds and then I saw Jacqueline coming towards the gate, her beret pulled against the drizzle. She had a carrier bag full of food, leeks prodding through the sides.

‘Nite luv,’ said the boy without moving his lips.

She hadn’t seen me. I wanted to hide behind the perspex elephant, jump out at her and say, ‘Let’s go for dinner.’

I am often beset by such romantic follies. I use them as ways out of real situations. Who the hell wants to go for dinner at 5.30 pm? Who wants to have a sexy walk in the rain alongside thousands of home-time commuters, all like you, carrying a shopping bag full of food?

‘Stick to it,’ I told myself. ‘Go on.’

‘Jacqueline.’ (I sound like someone from the CID.)