‘Yes, it’s the least.’ ‘Yes. It must be upstairs,’ and Paul left the kitchen and started upstairs, saying over his shoulder: ‘Well, come up, then?’ She wondered: Is he showing me his home in order to demonstrate something? Because he wants to tell me something? He doesn’t know I hate being here?

But she again obediently followed him up and into the bedroom. This room was different again, and had evidently been exactly as it was now for a long time. It had twin beds, on either side of a neat little table on which was a big framed photograph of Paul. The colours were green and orange and black, with a great many restless zebra stripes — the ‘jazz’ era in furnishing, twenty-five years after its birth. Paul had found his magazine, which was on the bedside table, and was ready to leave again. Ella said: ‘One of these days I’ll get a letter handed on by Dr West. “Dear Dr Allsop. Please tell me what to do. Lately I can’t sleep at nights. I’ve been drinking hot milk before going to bed and trying to keep a relaxed mind, but it doesn’t help. Please advise me, Muriel Tanner. PS. I forgot to mention, my husband wakes me early, about six o’clock, coming in from working late at the hospital. Sometimes he doesn’t come home all week. I get low in my spirits. This has been going on five years now.”’

Paul listened, with a sober, sad face. ‘It’s been no secret to you,’ he said at last, ‘that I’m not exactly proud of myself as a husband.’

‘For God’s sake, why don’t you put an end to it then?’

‘What!’ he exclaimed, half-laughing already, and back in his role as a rake, ‘abandon the poor woman with two children?’

‘She might get herself a man who cared for her. Don’t tell me you’d mind if she did. Surely you don’t like the idea of her living like this?’

He answered seriously: ‘I’ve told you, she’s a very simple woman. You always assume other people are like you. Well they aren’t. She likes watching television and reading Women at Home and sticking bits of wallpaper on the walls. And she’s a good mother.’

‘And she doesn’t mind not having a man?’

‘For all I know she has, I’ve never enquired,’ he said laughing again.

‘Oh well, I don’t know!’ said Ella, completely dispirited, following him downstairs again. She left the discordant little house thankfully, as if escaping from a trap; and she looked down the street and thought that probably they were all like this, all in fragments, not one of them a whole, reflecting a whole life, a whole human being; or, for that matter, a whole family. ‘What you don’t like,’ said Paul, as they drove off, ‘is that Muriel might be happy living like this.’

‘How can she be?’