I realize it is getting late. Molly comes back from her theatre. She says: ‘Is Michael coming?’ and I say: ‘Yes,’ but I see from her face that she doesn’t think he will. She asks me how the day has been, and I say I’ve decided to leave the Party. She nods, and says that she’s noticed that whereas she used to be on half a dozen different committees and was always busy on Party work, she’s now on one committee and can’t bring herself to do Party work. ‘So it comes to the same thing, I suppose,’ she says. But what’s worrying her this evening is Tommy. She doesn’t like his new girl-friend. (I didn’t either.) She says: ‘It’s just occurred to me, his girl-friends are all of the same type — the type that are bound not to like me. Whenever they are here, they simply radiate disapproval of me all the time; and instead of seeing we don’t meet, Tommy simply pushes us together. In other words, he is using his girl-friends as a kind of alter ego, to say about me what he thinks but doesn’t say aloud. Does that strike you as too far-fetched?’ Well it doesn’t, because I think she’s right, but I say it is. I am being tactful over Tommy, the way she is tactful about Michael’s leaving me — we shield each other. Then she says again about being sorry that Tommy was a conscientious objector, because his two years in the coal-mines have made him a sort of hero in a certain small circle, and ‘I can’t stand that awful self-satisfied exalted air of his.’ It irritates me too, but I say that he’s young and will grow out of it. ‘And I said an awful thing tonight: I said, thousands of men work down the coal-mines all their lives, and think nothing of it, for God’s sake don’t make such a thing out of it. And of course that was unfair, because it is a big thing, a boy of his background working down the coal-mines. And he did stick it out … all the same!’ She lights a cigarette, and I watch her hands lying on her knees; they look limp and discouraged. Then she says: ‘What frightens me is, I never seem to be able to see anything pure in what people do — do you know what I mean? Even when they do something good, I find myself getting all cynical and psychological about it — that is awful, Anna, isn’t it?’ I know only too well what she means, and say so, and we sit in a depressed silence until she says: ‘I think Tommy is going to marry this one, I just have a hunch.’ ‘Well he’s bound to marry one of them.’ ‘And I know that this sounds just like a mother resenting her son getting married — well, there’s that in it. But I swear I’d think she was awful anyway. She’s so bloody middle-class. And she’s ever such a socialist. You know, when I met her first I thought: Good God, who is this awful little Tory Tommy’s inflicted on me? Then it turns out she’s a socialist, you know, one of those academic socialists from Oxford. Studying sociology. You know, one gets into the mood where one keeps seeing the ghost of Keir Hardie. Well, that lot’d be surprised if they could see what they’ve spawned. Tommy’s new girl’d be a real eye-opener to them. You know, you can positively see the insurance policies and the savings accounts taking shape in the air all round them while they talk about making the Labour Party fulfil its pledges.