[The yellow notebook continued:]

The Shadow of the Third

From this point of the novel ‘the third’, previously Paul’s wife; then Ella’s younger alter ego formed from fantasies about Paul’s wife; then the memory of Paul; becomes Ella herself. As Ella cracks and disintegrates, she holds fast to the idea of Ella whole, healthy and happy. The link between the various ‘thirds’ must be made very clear: the link is normality, but more than that — conventionality, attitudes or emotions proper to the ‘respectable’ life which in fact Ella refuses to have anything to do with.

Ella moves into a new flat. Julia resentful. An area of their relationship obscured before is now exposed by Julia’s attitude. Julia had dominated Ella. Ella had been prepared to be dominated, or at least been prepared to look as if she was. Julia’s nature was essentially generous — kind, warm, giving. Yet now she even goes to the length of complaining to mutual friends that Ella had taken advantage of her, had made use of her. Ella, alone with her son in the big ugly dirty flat which she now has to clean and paint, thinks that in a sense what Julia complains of was true. She had been rather like a willing captive, with the captive’s hidden core of independence. Leaving Julia’s house was like a daughter leaving a mother. Or, she thinks wryly, remembering Paul’s unfriendly jokes that she was ‘married to Julia’ — like the breakup of a marriage.

Ella is for a while more alone than she has ever been. She thinks a great deal about her ruptured friendship with Julia. For she is closer to Julia than to anyone, if being ‘close’ means mutual confidence and shared experience. Yet at the moment this friendship is all hatred and resentment. And she cannot stop herself thinking about Paul who left her months ago. Over a year now.

Ella understands that, living with Julia, she has been protected from a certain kind of attention. She is now definitely ‘a woman living alone’; and that, although she has not realized it before, is very different from ‘two women sharing a house’.

For instance. Three weeks after she has moved into the new flat, Dr West telephones her. He informs her that his wife is on holiday and asks her to dinner. Ella goes, unable to believe, in spite of the too-carefully dropped information about his wife’s being away, that this is not to be a dinner about some aspect of office-work. During the dinner Ella slowly understands that Dr West is offering her an affair. She remembers the unkind remarks that he so carefully passed on to her at the time that Paul left her, and thinks that he has probably pigeonholed her in his mind for an occasion like this. She also understands, that if she, Ella, turns him down this evening he will work through a short list of three or four women, for he remarks spitefully: ‘There are others, you know. You aren’t condemning me to solitude.’