* 7 A Short Story

A wandering man happens to land in the house of a woman whom he likes and whom he needs. He is a man with long experience of women needing love. Usually he limits himself. But this time, the words he uses, the emotions he allows himself, are ambiguous, because he needs her kindness for a time. He makes love to her, but for him the sex is no worse or better than what he has experienced a hundred times before. He realizes that his need for temporary refuge has trapped him into what he most dreads: a woman saying, I love you. He cuts it. Says good-bye, formally, on the level of a friendship ending. Goes. Writes in his diary: Left London. Anna reproachful. She hated me. Well, so be it. And another entry, months later, which could read either: Anna married, good. Or: Anna committed suicide. Pity, a nice woman.

* 8 A Short Story

A woman artist — painter, writer, doesn’t matter which, lives alone. But her whole life is orientated around an absent man for whom she is waiting. Her flat too big, for instance. Her mind is filled with shapes of the man who will enter her life, meanwhile she ceases to paint or to write. Yet in her mind she is still ‘an artist’. Finally a man enters her life, some kind of artist, but one who has not yet crystallized as one. Her personality as ‘an artist’ goes into his, he feeds off it, works from it, as if she were a dynamo that fed energy into him. Finally he emerges, a real artist, fulfilled; the artist in her dead. The moment when she is no longer an artist, he leaves her, he needs the woman who has this quality, so that he can create.

* 9 A Short Novel

An American ‘ex-Red’ comes to London. No money, no friends. Blacklisted in the film and television worlds. The American colony in London, or rather, the American ‘ex-Red’ colony, know him as the man who started criticizing Stalinist attitudes in the Communist Party three or four years before they had the courage to do it. He goes to them for help, feeling that as he has been justified by events, they will forget their hostility. But their attitudes to him are still what they were when they were still dutiful Party members or fellow-travellers. He is still a renegade, this in spite of the fact that their attitudes have changed, and they are now beating their breasts because they didn’t break with the Party earlier. A rumour starts among them, a man who was formerly a dogmatic non-critical communist, but now hysterically breast-beating, that this new American is an agent of the FBI. The colony accept this rumour as fact, refuse him friendship and help. While they are ostracizing this man, they are talking self-righteously about the secret police in Russia, and the behaviour of the Anti-American Activity Committees and the informers, ex-Reds. The new American commits suicide. Then they all sit around remembering incidents from the political past, finding reasons to dislike him, to drown their guilt.