At this he glanced at her quickly, in surprise at her persistence — and, as Ella felt, out of a certain respect for it. There was no trace in that glance of a man assessing a woman for her sexual potentialities, and she felt more at ease.

‘So you’d like to put a giant bulldozer over it all, over all England?’

‘Yes.’

‘Leaving just a few cathedrals and old buildings and a pretty village or two?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And then you’d bring the people back into fine new cities, each one an architect’s dream, and tell everyone to like it or lump it.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Or perhaps you’d like a merrie England, beer, skittles and the girls in long homespun dresses?’

She said, angry: ‘Of course not! I hate all the William Morris stuff. But you’re being dishonest. Look at you — I’m sure you’ve spent most of your energy simply getting through the class barrier. There can’t be any connection at all between how you live now and the way your parents lived. You must be a stranger to them. You must be split in two parts. That’s what this country is like. You know it is. Well I hate it, I hate all that. I hate a country so split up that — I didn’t know anything about it until the war and I lived with all those women.’

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘they were right last night — you’re a revolutionary after all.’

‘No, I’m not. Those words don’t mean anything to me. I’m not interested in politics at all.’

At which he laughed, but said, with an affection that touched her: ‘If you had your way, building the new Jerusalem, it would be like killing a plant by suddenly moving it into the wrong soil. There’s a continuity, some kind of invisible logic to what happens. You’d kill the spirit of people if you had your way.’

‘A continuity isn’t necessarily right, just because it’s a continuity.’

‘Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is.’

This was so personal, that it was her turn to glance, surprised, at him, and decide to say nothing. He is saying, she thought, that the split in himself is so painful that sometimes he wonders if it was worth it … and she turned away to look out of the window again. They were passing through another village. This was better than the last: there was an old centre, of mellow rooted houses, warm in the sunshine. But around the centre, ugly new houses and even in the main square, a Woolworth’s, indistinguishable from all the others, and a fake Tudor pub. There would be a string of such villages, one after another. Ella said: ‘Let’s get away from the villages, where there isn’t anything at all.’