Later he would say: ‘When I telephoned you, after you had flounced indoors — you just came, you just needed persuading.’ And he laughed. She hated the tone of the laugh. At such moments he would put on a rueful, and self-consciously rueful, rake’s smile, playing the part of a rake so that he could laugh at himself. Yet he was having it both ways, Ella felt, for his complaint was genuine. And so at such moments she would first smile with him, at his parody of the rake; and then quickly change the subject. It was as if he had a personality at these moments not his. She was convinced it was not his. It was on a level that not only had nothing to do with the simplicity and ease of their being together; but betrayed it so completely that she had no alternative but to ignore it. Otherwise she would have had to break with him.

They did not go to the pictures, but to a coffee bar. Again he told stories about his work at the hospital. He had two posts, at two different hospitals. At one he was a consultant psychiatrist. At the other he was doing a reorganizing job. As he put it: ‘I’m trying to change a snake-pit into something more civilized. And who do I have to fight? The public? Not at all, it’s the old-fashioned doctors …’ His stories had two themes. One the stuffed-shirt pomposity of the middle level of the medical establishment. Ella realized that all his criticisms were from the simplest class viewpoint; implicit in what he said, though he didn’t say it, was that stupidity and lack of imagination were middle-class characteristics, and that his attitude, progressive and liberating, was because he was working-class. Which of course, was how Julia talked; and how Ella herself criticized Dr West. And yet several times she found herself stiffening in resentment, as if it was herself who was being criticized; and when this happened she fell back on her memories of the years in the canteen, and thought that if she had not had that experience she would not be able now to see the upper class of this country, from beneath, through the eyes of the factory girls, like so many bizarre fish viewed through the glass bottom of an aquarium. Paul’s second theme was the reverse side of the first, and marked by a change of his whole personality when he touched on it. Telling his critical stories he was full of a delighted malicious irony. But talking of his patients he was serious. His attitude was the same as hers to the ‘Mrs Browns’ — they were already referring to her petitioners in this collective way. He spoke of them with an extraordinary delicacy of kindness, and with an angry compassion. The anger was for their helplessness.