‘You make a habit of it, then?’ he enquired. His voice was sober, detached. She thought that whereas a moment ago he was asking on his own account, as a man; now he was again talking ‘like a man behind a desk’. She was thinking that she only wanted the drive home to be over so that she could go home and cry. The love-making was now linked in her mind with memories of her husband, and the shrinking of her body from George’s, because she was shrinking away in spirit from this new man.

‘So you make a habit of it?’ he asked again.

‘Of what?’ She laughed. ‘Oh, I see.’ And she looked at him incredulously, as if he were mad. At the moment he seemed to her slightly mad, his face tense with suspicion. He was not at all, now, the ‘man behind a desk’, but a man hostile to her. Now she was quite set against him, and she laughed angrily, and said: ‘You’re very stupid after all.’

They did not speak again until they reached the main road, and joined the stream of traffic slowly congealed along the way back to the city. Then he remarked, in a different voice, companionable, a peace-offering: ‘I’m not in a position to criticize, after all. My love life could hardly be described as exemplary.’

‘I hope you found me a satisfactory diversion.’

He looked puzzled. He seemed stupid to her because he was not understanding. She could see him framing words and then discarding them. And so she gave him no chance to talk. She felt as if she had been dealt, deliberately, one after the other, blows which were aimed at some place just below her breasts. She was almost gasping at the pain of these blows. Her lips were trembling, but she would rather have died than cry in front of him. She turned her face aside, watching a countryside now falling into shadow and cold, and began to talk herself. She could, when she set herself to it, be hard, malicious, amusing. She entertained him with sophisticated gossip about the magazine office, the affairs of Patricia Brent, etc. etc., while she despised him for accepting this counterfeit of herself. She talked on and on, while he was silent; and when they reached Julia’s house, she got fast out of the car, and was in the doorway before he could follow her. She was fumbling with the key in the lock when he came up behind her and said: ‘Would your friend Julia put your son to bed tonight? We could go to a play if you’d like it. No, a film, it’s Sunday.’ She positively gasped with surprise: ‘But I’m not going to see you again, surely you don’t expect me to?’

He took her shoulders with his hands from behind and said: ‘But, why not? You liked me, it’s no good pretending you didn’t.’ To this, Ella had no answer, it was not her language. And she could not remember, now, how happy she had been with him in the field. She said: ‘I’m not seeing you again.’

‘Why not?’