He gets up and washes and shaves and I make his breakfast. We always eat it on a low table by the bed, whose covers have been hastily pulled up. Now we have coffee and fruit and toast; and he is already the professional man, smooth-suited, clear-eyed, calm. He is watching me. I know this is because he plans to tell me something. Is today the day he will break it off? I remember this is the first morning together for a week. I don’t want to think about this because it is unlikely that Michael, feeling confined and unhappy in his home, as he does, has been with his wife for the last six days. Where then? My feeling is not so much of jealousy, as of a dull heavy pain, the pain of loss. But I smile, pass him the toast, offer him the newspapers. He takes the papers, glances at them, and remarks: ‘If you can put up with me two nights running — I have to be at the hospital down the road this evening to give a lecture.’ I smile; for a moment we exchange irony, because of the years we have spent night after night together. Then he slides off into sentimentality, but parodying it at the same time: ‘Ah, Anna, but look how it has worn thin for you.’ I merely smile again, because there’s no point in saying anything, and then he says, this time gaily, in the parody of a rake’s manner: ‘You get more and more practical with every day that dawns. Every man with sense knows that when a woman gets all efficient on him, the time has come to part.’ Suddenly it’s too painful for me to play this game, and I say: ‘Well, anyway, I’ll love you to come this evening. Do you want to eat here?’ He says: ‘It’s not likely I should refuse to eat with you when you’re such a cook, now is it?’ ‘I shall look forward to it,’ I say.

He says: ‘If you can get dressed quickly, I can give you a lift to your office.’ I hesitate, because I am thinking: If I have to cook this evening, then I must buy food before I go to work. He says quickly, because of the hesitation: ‘But if you’d rather not, then I’ll be off.’ He kisses me; and the kiss is a continuation of all the love we’ve had together. He says, cancelling the moment of intimacy, for his words continue the other theme: ‘If we have nothing else in common, we have sex.’ Whenever he says this, and it is only recently he has been saying it, I feel the pit of my stomach go cold; it is the total rejection of me, or so I feel it; and there is a great distance between us. Across the distance I say ironically: ‘Is that all we have together?’ and he says: ‘All? But my dear Anna, my dear Anna — but I must go, I’ll be late.’ And he goes, with the bitter rueful smile of a rejected man.