De Silva and I spent the night together. Why? Because it didn’t matter to me. Its mattering to me, the possibility of its mattering to me, was pushed well away into a distance. It belonged to the Anna who was normal, who was walking away somewhere on a horizon of white sand, who I could see but could not touch.

For me, the night was deadly, like his interested, detached smile. He was cool, detached, abstracted. It didn’t matter to him. Yet at moments he suddenly relapsed into an abject mother-needing child. I minded these moments more than the cool detachment and the curiosity. For I kept thinking stubbornly: Of course it’s him, not me. For men create these things, they create us. In the morning, remembering how I clung, how I always cling on to this, I felt foolish. Because why should it be true?

In the morning, I gave him breakfast. I felt cold and detached. Blasted - I felt as if there was no life or warmth left in me. I felt as if he had drained life out of me. But we were perfectly friendly. I felt friendly and detached from him. Just as he left, he said he would telephone me and I said that I would not sleep with him again. His face changed suddenly into a vicious anger; and I saw his face as it must have been when the girl he picked up in the street responded to his saying that he loved her. That was how he looked when she responded - angry and vicious. But I had not expected it. Then the mask of smiling detachment came back, and he said: ‘Why not?’ I said: ‘Because you don’t care a damn whether you sleep with me or not.’ I had expected him to say: ‘But you don’t care either,’ which I would have accepted. But suddenly he cracked into the pathetic child of the moments in the night, and he said: ‘But I do, indeed I do.’ He was positively on the point of beating his breast to prove it - he stopped his clenched hand on the way to his breast, I saw him. And again I felt the atmosphere of the dream of the fog - meaninglessness, the emptiness of emotion.

I said: ‘No, you don’t. But we’ll go on as friends.’ He went right downstairs, without a word. That afternoon he rang me up. He told me two or three cool, amused, malicious stories about people we know in common. I knew something else was coming, because I felt apprehension, but I couldn’t imagine what. Then he remarked, abstractedly, almost indifferent: ‘I want you to let a friend of mine sleep in your upstairs room tonight. You know, the one just above your room where you sleep.’