She furiously wriggled her shoulders free, put the key in the door, turned it, and said: ‘I haven’t slept with anyone at all for a long time. Not since an affair I had for a week, two years ago. It was a lovely affair …’ She saw him wince and felt pleasure because she was hurting him, and because she was lying, it had not been a lovely affair. But, telling the truth now, and accusing him with every atom of her flesh, she said: ‘He was an American. He never made me feel bad, not once. He wasn’t at all good in bed, I’m sure that’s one of your phrases, isn’t it? But he didn’t despise me.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘You’re so stupid,’ she said, in a gay scornful voice. And she felt a hard bitter gaiety rise in her, destructive of him and of herself. ‘You talk about my husband. Well what’s he got to do with it? As far as I’m concerned I never slept with him at all …’ He laughed, incredulously and bitterly, but she went on: ‘I hated sleeping with him. It didn’t count. And you say, how long is it since you slept with another man? Surely it’s all perfectly simple. You’re a psychiatrist, you say, a soul-doctor, and you don’t understand the simplest things about anyone.’

With which she went into Julia’s house, and shut the door, and put her face to the wall and began to cry. From the feeling of the house she knew it was still empty. The bell rang, almost in her ear: Paul trying to make her open the door. But she left the sound of the bell behind, and went up through the dark well of the house to the bright little flat at the top, slowly, crying. And now the telephone rang. She knew it was Paul, in the telephone box across the street. She let it ring, because she was crying. It stopped and started again. She looked at the compact, impersonal black curves of the instrument and hated it; she swallowed her tears, steadied her voice and answered. It was Julia. Julia said she wanted to stay to supper with her friends; she would bring the child home with her later and put him to bed, and if Ella wanted to go out she could. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ came Julia’s voice, full and calm as usual, across two miles of streets. ‘I’m crying.’ ‘I can hear you are, what for?’ ‘Oh, these bloody men, I hate them all.’ ‘Oh well, if it’s like that, but better go off to the pictures then, it’ll cheer you up.’ Immediately Ella felt better, the incident was less important, and she laughed.

When the telephone rang half-an-hour later, she answered it, not thinking of Paul. But it was Paul. He had waited in his car, he said, to telephone again. He wanted to talk to her. ‘I don’t see what we’ll achieve by it,’ said Ella, sounding cool and humorous. And he, sounding humorous and quizzical, said: ‘Come to the pictures, and we won’t talk.’ So she went. She met him with ease. This was because she had told herself she would not make love with him again. It was all finished. Her going out with him was because it seemed melodramatic not to. And because his voice on the telephone had no connection at all with the hardness of his face above her in the field. And because they now would return to their relationship in the car driving away from London. His attitude to having had her in the field had simply cancelled it out. It hadn’t happened, if that was the way he felt about it!