It was true. Lying in the darkness, inside Paul’s arms, she thought that those arms had slowly, over the years, shut out everyone else. She went out very little, because she did not enjoy going out by herself, and because she had accepted, very early on, that to go out together into company meant more trouble than it was worth. Either Paul was jealous, or he said he was odd-man-out among her literary friends. At which Ella would say: ‘They aren’t friends, they are acquaintances.’ She had no vital connection with anyone but her son, Paul and Julia. Julia would keep, it was a friendship for life. So now she said: ‘I can come with you, can’t I?’ He hesitated, and said, laughing: ‘But you don’t want to give up all your exciting literary goings-on in London?’ She told him he was quite crazy, and began making plans to go.

One day she went with him to his home. His wife and children were away on holiday. It was after a film they had just seen together, and he had said he wanted to pick up a clean shirt. He pulled his car up outside a small house, in a row of identical houses in a suburb off to the north of Shepherd’s Bush. Children’s toys lay abandoned over a small patch of neat garden.

‘I keep telling Muriel about the kids,’ he said, irritated. ‘They really can’t leave their things lying about like this.’

This was the moment that she understood this was his home.

‘Well, come in a moment,’ he said. She did not want to go inside, but she followed him. The hall had a conventional flowered wallpaper and a dark sideboard and a strip of pretty carpet. For some reason it comforted Ella. The living-room came from a different epoch of taste: it had three different wallpapers and discordant curtains and cushions. Evidently it had just been done up; it still had the look of being on show. It was depressing, and Ella followed Paul into the kitchen on his search for the clean shirt, on this occasion a medical journal he needed. The kitchen was the used room of the house, and was shabby. But one wall had been covered with red wallpaper, so it seemed that this room, too, was in the process of being transformed. On the kitchen table were stacked dozens of copies of Women at Home. Ella felt she had been delivered a direct blow; but told herself that after all she worked for this nasty snobbish magazine, and what right had she to sneer at people who read it? She told herself that she knew no one who was absorbed heart and soul in the work they did; everyone seemed to work reluctantly, or with cynicism, or with a divided mind, so she was no worse than everyone else. But it was no use; there was a small television set in a corner of the kitchen, and she imagined the wife sitting here, night after night, reading Women at Home or looking at the television set and listening for the children upstairs. Paul saw her standing there, fingering the magazines and examining the room, and remarked, with his familiar grim humour: ‘This is her house, Ella. To do as she likes in. It’s surely the least I can do.’