I examine him — he sits on his desk, with a half-eaten dry and tasteless sandwich in his hand, looking, despite everything, like a don — which is what he might have chosen to be. Rather boyish, bespectacled, pale, intellectual. And decent. Yes, that is the word, decent. And yet behind him, part of him, like myself, the miserable history of blood, murder, misery, betrayal, lies. He says: ‘Anna, are you crying?’ ‘I might very easily,’ I say. He nods, and says: ‘You must do what you feel you have to do.’ Then I laugh, because he has spoken out of his British upbringing, the decent nonconformist conscience. And he knows why I am laughing, and he nods and says: ‘We are all the product of our experience. I had the ill-luck to be born as a conscious human being into the early ‘thirties.’ Suddenly I am unbearably unhappy, and I say: ‘Jack, I’m going back to work,’ and I go back to my office, and put my head down on my arms, and thank God that the stupid secretary has gone out to lunch. I think: Michael is leaving me, that’s finished; and although he left the Party years ago, he’s part of the whole thing. And I’m leaving the Party. It’s a stage of my life finished. And what next? I’m going out, willing it, into something new, and I’ve got to. I’m shedding a skin, or being born again. The secretary, Rose, comes in, catches me with my head on my arms, asks me if I’m ill. I say I am short of sleep and was having a nap. And I start on the ‘welfare work’. I’m going to miss it when I leave: I find myself thinking: I’m going to miss the illusion of doing something useful, and wonder if I really believe it is an illusion.

About eighteen months ago, in one of the Party Magazines, there was a small paragraph to the effect that Boles and Hartley, this firm, had decided to publish novels as well as the sociology, history, etc., which is its main business. And all at once the office was flooded with manuscripts. We used to make jokes that every member of the Party must be a part-time novelist, but then it stopped being a joke. Because with every manuscript — some of them obviously hoarded in drawers for years, came a letter; and these letters have become my business. Most of the novels are pretty bad, either written by the banal Anon, or ordinarily incompetent. But the letters come out of a different climate altogether. I’ve been saying to Jack what a pity we couldn’t print a selection of fifty or so of these letters, as a book. To which he replies: ‘But my dear Anna, that would be an anti-Party act, what are you suggesting!’