It was after the time he rang me to ask: Have I hurt you? that I dreamed and recognized it as the joy-in-destruction. The dream was a telephone conversation between me and Nelson. Yet he was in the same room. His outward guise was the responsible, warm-feeling man. Yet as he spoke his smile changed and I recognized the sudden unmotivated spite. I felt the knife turn in my flesh, between my ribs, the edges of the knife grinding sharp against the bone. I could not speak, because the danger, the destruction, came from someone I was close to, someone I liked. Then I began to speak into the telephone receiver, and on my own face I could feel the beginning of the smile, the smile of joyful spite. I even made a few dancing steps, the head-jerking, almost doll-like stiff dance of the animated vase. I remember thinking in the dream: So now I am the evil vase; next I’ll be the old man-dwarf; then the hunch-backed old woman. Then what? Then Nelson’s voice down the receiver into my ear: Then the witch, then the young witch. I woke, hearing the words ring out with a terrible spiteful gleeful joy: ‘The witch, and then the young witch!’

I have been very depressed. I have depended a great deal on that personality - Janet’s mother. I continually ask myself - how extraordinary, that when inside I am flat, nervous, dead, I can still, for Janet, be calm, responsible, alive?

I haven’t had the dream again. But two days ago I met a man at Molly’s house. A man from Ceylon. He made overtures, and I rejected them. I was afraid of being rejected, of another failure. Now I am ashamed. I am becoming a coward. I am frightened because my first impulse, when a man strikes the sexual note, is to run, run anywhere, out of the way of hurt.

[A heavy black line across the page.]

De Silva from Ceylon. He was a friend of Molly’s. I met him years ago at her house. He came to London some years ago and earned his living as a journalist, but rather poorly. He married an Englishwoman. He impressed one at a party by his sarcastic cool manner; he made witty remarks about people, cruel, but curiously detached. Remembering him, I see him standing away from a group of people, looking on, smiling. He lived with his wife the bed-sitting-room, spaghetti-life of the literary fringes. They had one small child. Unable to earn a living here, he decided to return to Ceylon. His wife was unwilling: he is the younger son of a high-class family, very snobbish, who resented his marrying a white woman. He persuaded his wife to go back with him. His family would not take his wife in, so he found a room for her and spent his time half with her and the child and the other half with the family. She wanted to return to England, but he said it would be all right, and talked her into having another baby, which she did not want. No sooner was this second child born than he took flight.