Subsidiary motifs. Her novel. He asks what she is writing and she tells him. Reluctantly, because his voice is always full of distrust when he mentions her writing. She says: ‘It’s a novel about suicide.’

‘And what do you know about suicide?’

‘Nothing, I’m just writing it.’ (To Julia she makes bitter jokes about Jane Austen hiding her novels under the blotting paper when people come into the room; quotes Stendhal’s dictum that any woman under fifty who writes, should do so under a pseudonym.)

During the next few days he tells her stories about his patients who are suicidal. It takes her a long time to understand he is doing this because he thinks she is too naïve and ignorant to write about suicide. (And she even agrees with him.) He is instructing her. She begins to hide her work from him. She says she doesn’t care about ‘being a writer, she just wants to write the book, to see what will happen’. This makes no sense to him, it seems, and soon he begins to complain that she is using his professional knowledge to get facts for the novel.

The motif of Julia. Paul dislikes Ella’s relationship with Julia. He sees it as a pact against him, and makes professional jokes about the Lesbian aspects of this friendship. At which Ella says that in that case, his friendships with men are homosexual? But he says she has no sense of humour. At first Ella’s instinct is to sacrifice Julia for Paul; but later their friendship does change, it becomes critical of Paul. The conversations between the two women are sophisticated, full of critical insight, implicitly critical of men. Yet Ella does not feel this is disloyalty to Paul, because these conversations come from a different world; the world of sophisticated insight has nothing to do with her feeling for Paul.

The motif of Ella’s maternal love for Michael. She is always fighting to get Paul to be a father to the child and always failing. And Paul says: ‘You’ll come to be glad yet, you’ll see I was right.’ Which can only mean: When I’ve left you, you’ll be glad I didn’t form close ties with your son. And so Ella chooses not to hear it.

The motif of Paul’s attitude to his profession. He is split on this. He takes his work for his patients seriously, but makes fun of the jargon he uses. He will tell a story about a patient, full of subtlety and depth, but using the language of literature and of emotion. Then he will judge the same anecdote in psycho-analytical terms, giving it a different dimension. And then, five minutes later, he will be making the most intelligent and ironical fun of the terms he has just used as yardsticks to judge the literary standards, the emotional truths. And at each moment, in each personality — literary, psycho-analytical, the man who distrusts all systems of thought that consider themselves final — he will be serious and expect Ella to accept him fully for that moment; and he resents it when she attempts to link these personalities in him.

Their life together becomes full of phrases, and symbols. ‘Mrs Brown’ means his patients and her women who ask for help.