Ella says drily: ‘My dear Julia, we’ve chosen to be free women, and this is the price we pay, that’s all.’

‘Free,’ says Julia. ‘Free! What’s the use of us being free if they aren’t? I swear to God, that every one of them, even the best of them, have the old idea of good women and bad women.’

‘And what about us? Free, we say, yet the truth is they get erections when they’re with a woman they don’t give a damn about, but we don’t have an orgasm unless we love him. What’s free about that?’

Julia says: ‘Then you’re luckier than I have been. I was thinking yesterday: of the ten men I’ve been in bed with during the last five years, eight have been impotent or come too quickly. I was blaming myself — of course, we always do, isn’t it odd, the way we positively fall over ourselves to blame ourselves for everything? But even that damned actor, the one who said I was castrating, was kind enough to remark, oh, only in passing of course, that he had only found one woman in his life he could make it with. Oh, don’t run away with the idea that he mentioned it to make me feel better, not at all.’

‘My dear Julia, you didn’t sit down to count them?’

‘Not until I started thinking about it, no.’

Ella finds herself in a new mood or phase. She becomes completely sexless. She puts it down to the incident with the Canadian scriptwriter, but does not care particularly. She is now cool, detached, self-sufficient. Not only can she not remember what it was like, being afflicted with sexual desire, but she cannot believe she will ever feel desire again. She knows, however, that this condition, being self-sufficient and sexless, is only the other side of being possessed by sex.

She rings up Julia to announce that she has given up sex, given up men, because ‘she can’t be bothered’. Julia’s good-humoured scepticism positively crackles in Ella’s ear, and she says: ‘But I mean it.’ ‘Good for you,’ says Julia.

Ella decides to write again, searches herself for the book which is already written inside her, and waiting to be written down. She spends a great deal of time alone, waiting to discern the outlines of this book inside her.

I see Ella, walking slowly about a big empty room, thinking, waiting. I, Anna, see Ella. Who is of course, Anna. But that is the point, for she is not. The moment I, Anna, write: Ella rings up Julia to announce, etc., then Ella floats away from me and becomes someone else. I don’t understand what happens at the moment Ella separates herself from me and becomes Ella. No one does. It’s enough to call her Ella, instead of Anna. Why did I choose the name Ella? Once I met a girl at a party called Ella. She reviewed books for some newspaper and read manuscripts for a publisher. She was small, thin, dark — the same physical type as myself. She wore her hair tied back with a black bow. I was struck by her eyes, extraordinarily watchful and defensive. They were windows in a fortress. People were drinking heavily. The host came over to fill our glasses. She put out her hand — a thin, white delicate hand, at just that moment when he had put an inch of liquor in her glass, to cover it. She gave a cool nod: ‘That’s enough.’ Then a cool shake, as he pressed to fill the glass. He went off; she saw I had been looking. She picked up the glass with just an inch of red wine in it, and said: ‘That’s the exact amount I need for the right degree of intoxication.’ I laughed. But no, she was serious. She drank the inch of red wine, and then remarked: ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Assessing how the alcohol was affecting her — she gave another small, cool nod. ‘Yes, that was just right.’