And at that, as if the switch had been turned on, he gave his loud triumphing laugh, and said: ‘You want to drive me into the loony bin? Why should I pay for an analyst when I’ve got you? You’ve got to pay the fee for being a healthy normal person. You’re not the first person to tell me to get to a head-shrinker. Well I’m not going to be dictated to by anyone.’ He leaped off the bed and shouted: ‘I am I, Saul Green, I am what I am what I am. I …’ The shouting, automatic I, I, I speech began, but suddenly stopped, or rather halted, ready to go on: he stood, mouth open, in silence, said: ‘I, I mean I …’ the scattered last shots of gun-fire, then remarked normally: ‘I’m getting out, I’ve got to get out of here.’ He went out, jumping up the stairs in a frenzy of energy. I heard him opening drawers and crashing them shut. I thought: Perhaps he’s leaving here altogether? But in a few moments he was down, and knocked on the door. I began to laugh, thinking this was a sort of humorous apology, the knock. I said, ‘Come in, Mr Green,’ and he came in, and said, with a polite formal dislike: ‘I’ve decided I want to take a walk. I’m getting stale, being shut in this flat.’

I realized that while he was up in his room, what had happened in the last few minutes had changed in his mind. I said: ‘All right, it’s a perfect evening for a walk.’

He said, with boyish candour, enthusiasm: ‘Gee, but you’re right.’ He went down the stairs like a prisoner escaping. I lay for a long time, hearing my heart thump, feeling my stomach churn. Then I came to write this. Yet, of the happiness, the normality, the laughter, not a word will be written. In five or ten years’ time, reading this, it will be a record of two people, crazy and cruel.

Last night, when I had finished writing, I took out the whisky and poured myself half a glassful. I sat taking small mouthfuls, drinking deliberately so that the liquor would slide down and hit the tension below my diaphragm, stun it into painlessness. I thought: If I stayed with Saul, I could easily become a drunkard. I thought: How conventional we are: the fact that I’ve lost my will, have spells of being a jealous maniac, that I’m capable of malicious driving joy in outwitting a man who is sick, none of this shocks me as much as the thought: You might become an alcoholic. Yet being an alcoholic is nothing, compared to the rest. I drank Scotch, and thought of Saul. I imagined him leaving this flat to telephone, from downstairs, one of the women. Jealousy drove through every vein in my body, like a poison, altering my breathing, making my eyes hurt. Then I imagined him stumbling through the city, ill, and I was frightened, thinking I shouldn’t have let him go, although I couldn’t have stopped him. I sat for a long time, worrying about his being ill. Then I thought of the other woman and the jealousy started to work again in my blood. I hated him. I remembered the cold tone of his diaries and hated him for it. I went upstairs, telling myself I should not, but knowing I would, and looked in his current diary. It was lying carelessly exposed, I wondered if he had written something for me to see, there were no entries for the last week, but under today’s date: Am a prisoner. Am slowly going mad with frustration.