Meanwhile the masses of students who had not come to pursue their private need to challenge and be punished by authority continued to chant slogans, to test out their political voices, and their relationship with the police was a different one altogether, there was no bond between them and the police.

And what look had Tommy’s face worn when he had been arrested? Anna knew without having seen it.

When she opened the door of Tommy’s room he was alone and he asked at once: ‘Is that Anna?’

Anna stopped herself from saying: How did you know? and asked: ‘where’s Marion?’

He said, stiff and suspicious: ‘She’s upstairs.’ He might have said aloud: ‘I don’t want you to see her.’ His dark blank eyes were fixed on Anna, almost centred on her, so that she felt exposed, so heavy was that dark stare. Yet it was not quite centred; the Anna whom he was forbidding or warning, was very slightly to her left. Anna felt, with a touch of hysteria, that she was being forced to move left, into his direct line of vision, or no-vision. Anna said: ‘I’ll go up, no please don’t bother.’ For he had half-raised himself, in a movement to stop her. She shut the door and went straight up the stairs to the flat she had lived in with Janet. She was thinking that she had left Tommy because she had no connection with him, had nothing to say; that she was going to see Marion, to whom she had nothing to say.

The stairs were narrow and dark. Anna’s head lifted out of the well of dark into the white painted cleanliness of a tiny landing. Through the door she saw Marion, bent over a newspaper. She greeted Anna with a gay social smile. ‘Look!’ she cried, thrusting a paper triumphantly at Anna. There was a photograph of Marion, and the words: ‘It’s absolutely sickening the way the poor Africans are being treated.’ And so on. The comment was malicious, but apparently Marion couldn’t see that it was. She read over Anna’s shoulder, smiling, giving naughty little hunches to her shoulders, almost wriggling with guilty delight. ‘My mother and my sisters are absolutely furious, they are absolutely beside themselves.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Anna, drily. She heard her dry critical little voice, saw Marion wince away from it. Anna sat in the white-covered armchair. Marion sat on the bed. She looked like a great girl, this untidy handsome matron. She looked winsome and coquettish.

Anna thought: I’m here, presumably, to make Marion face reality. What is her reality? An awful honesty lit by liquor. Why shouldn’t she be like this, why shouldn’t she spend the rest of her life giggling and tipping policemen’s helmets and conspiring with Tommy?