Ella made herself not-think about this conversation until she had completed the division of letters with Dr West. Well, I’ve been naïve, she decided at last. I suppose he was having an affair with Stephanie at the hospital. At least, he never mentioned anyone but Stephanie, he was always talking about her. But he never spoke of her in that tone, ‘flighty piece’. No, that’s the Wests’ language, they use idiotic phrases like flighty piece and getting tired of a gay life, how extraordinarily common these respectable middle-class people are.

Meanwhile she was deeply depressed; and the shadow that she had been fighting off since Paul had left engulfed her completely. She thought about Paul’s wife: she must have felt like this, this complete rejection, when Paul lost interest in her. Well at least she, Ella, had had the advantage of being too stupid to realize that Paul was having an affair with Stephanie. But perhaps Muriel had also chosen to be stupid — had chosen to believe that Paul spent so many nights at the hospital?

Ella had a dream which was unpleasant and disturbing. She was in the ugly little house, with its little rooms that were all different from each other. She was Paul’s wife, and only by an effort of will could she prevent the house disintegrating, and flying off in all directions because of the conflict between the rooms. She decided she must furnish the whole house again, in one style, hers. But as soon as she hung new curtains or painted a room out, Muriel’s room was recreated. Ella was like a ghost in this house and she realized it would hold together, somehow, as long as Muriel’s spirit was in it and was holding together precisely because every room belonged to a different epoch, a different spirit. And Ella saw herself standing in the kitchen, her hand on the pile of Women at Home; she was a ‘sexy piece’ (she could hear the words being said, by Dr West) with a tight coloured skirt and a very tight jersey and her hair was cut fashionably. And Ella realized that Muriel was not there after all, she had gone to Nigeria to join Paul, and Ella was waiting in the house until Paul came back.

When Ella woke after this dream she was crying. It occurred to her, for the first time, that the woman from whom Paul had had to separate himself, for whom he had gone to Nigeria, because he had at all costs to separate himself from her, was herself. She was the flighty piece.

She understood also that Dr West had spoken deliberately, perhaps because of some phrase in Paul’s letter to him; it was a warning from the respectable world of Dr West, protecting one of its members, to Ella.