Willi shrugged and we were silent. Through the heavy midday hush, came the sound of Johnnie’s drumming fingers.

George looked at me again and I rallied myself to fight Willi. Looking back I want to laugh — because I automatically chose to argue in literary terms, just as he automatically answered in political terms. But at the time it didn’t seem extraordinary. And it didn’t seem extraordinary to George either, who sat nodding as I spoke.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘In the nineteenth century literature was full of this. It was a sort of moral touchstone. Like Resurrection, for instance. But now you just shrug your shoulders and it doesn’t matter?’

‘I haven’t noticed that I shrugged,’ said Willi. ‘But perhaps it is true that the moral dilemma of a society is no longer crystallized by the fact of an illegitimate child?’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Why not?’ said George, very fierce.

‘Well, would you really say the problem of the African in this country is summed up by the Boothbys’ cook’s white cuckoo?’

‘You put things so prettily,’ said George angrily. (And yet he would continue to come to Willi humbly for advice, and revere him, and write to him self-abasing letters for years after he left the Colony.) Now he stared out into the sunlight, blinking away tears, and then he said: ‘I’m going to get my glass filled.’ He went off to the bar.

Willi lifted his text-book, and said without looking at me: ‘Yes, I know. But I’m not impressed by your reproachful eyes. You’d give him the same advice, wouldn’t you? Full of ohs and ahs, but the same advice.’

‘What it amounts to is that everything is so terrible that we’ve got calloused because of it and we don’t really care.’

‘May I suggest you stick to certain basic principles — such as abolishing what is wrong, changing what is wrong? Instead of sitting around crying about it?’

‘And in the meantime?’

‘In the meantime I’m going to study and you will go off and let George weep on your shoulder and be very sorry for him, which will achieve precisely nothing.’

I left him and walked slowly back up to the big room. George was leaning against the wall, a glass in his hand, eyes closed. I knew I should go to him, but I didn’t. I went into the big room. Maryrose was sitting by herself at a window and I joined her. She had been crying.

I said: ‘This seems to be a day for everyone to cry.’

‘Not you,’ said Maryrose. This meant that I was too happy with Willi to need to cry, so I sat down by her and said ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I was sitting here and watching them dance and I began thinking. Only a few months ago we believed that the world was going to change and everything was going to be beautiful and now we know it won’t.’

‘Do we?’ I said, with a kind of terror.