We drank a lot; it was a gathering where people set themselves, from the moment of entering, to get just so much drink inside them as soon as possible. Well, I’m not used to it, and so I was drunker than anyone, and very quickly, though they drank very much more than I did. I noticed a tiny blonde woman, in a tight Chinese green brocade dress. Really beautiful she was, with a tiny neat exquisiteness. She was, or is, the fourth wife of a big ugly dark man, a film tycoon of some kind. She had four doubles in an hour, yet she was cool, controlled, charming; watching her husband’s drinking anxiously, babying him out of getting really drunk. ‘My baby doesn’t really need that new drink’ — cooing at him, baby talk. And he: ‘Oh yes, your baby needs that drink and he’s going to have it.’ And she stroked and patted him: ‘My little baby’s not going to drink, no he isn’t, because his momma says so.’ And Good Lord, he didn’t. She caressed and babied him, and I thought it was insulting; until I saw this was the basis of this marriage — the beautiful green Chinese dress and the long beautiful earrings, in return for mothering him, babying him. I was embarrassed. No one else was embarrassed. I realized, as I sat there, much too tight, watching them; out of it because I can’t talk the cool wisecracking talk, that I was above all embarrassed; and afraid that next time there was a dangerous corner they wouldn’t cover up in time, there’d be some awful explosion. Well, about midnight there was; but I understood there was no need to be scared, because they were all far ahead of me in some area of sophistication well beyond anything I was used to; and it was their self-aware, self-parodying humour that insulated them against real hurt. Protected them, that is, until the moment when the violence exploded into another divorce, or drunken breakdown.

I kept watching Nelson’s wife, so bold and attractive and vital, her eyes fixed on Nelson every moment of the evening. Her eyes had a kind of wide, blank, disorganized look about them. I knew the look, but couldn’t place it, then at last remembered: Mrs Boothby’s eyes were like that when she was cracking up, at the end of the story; they were frantic and disorganized, yet staring wide with the effort not to show the state she was in. And Nelson’s wife was locked, I could see, in some permanent, controlled hysteria. Then I understood that they all were; they were all people on the extreme edge of themselves, controlling it, holding it, while hysteria flickered in the good-humoured barbed talk, in the shrewd, on-guard eyes.

Yet they were all used to it, they had been living inside it for years; it was not strange to them, only to me. And yet, sitting there in a corner, not drinking any more, because I had got tight too quickly, and was in the over-aware, over-sensitive state of having drunk too much too quickly and waiting for it all to subside — I understood that this was not so new to me as I imagined; this was nothing more than I had seen in a hundred English marriages, English homes; it was the same thing taken a stage further, taken into awareness and self-consciousness. They were, I understood, above all self-conscious people, aware of themselves all the time; and it was from the awareness, a self-disgusted awareness, that the humour came. The humour was not at all the verbal play, harmless and intellectualized, that the English use; but a sort of disinfection, a making-harmless, a ‘naming’ to save themselves from pain. It was like peasants touching amulets to avert the evil eye.