I wrote the last sentence three days ago, but I didn’t realize it was three days until I worked it out. I’m in love and so time has gone. Two nights ago we talked late, while the tensions built up. I wanted to laugh, because it’s always funny, two people manoeuvring, so to speak, before sex; at the time I felt a reluctance, precisely because I was in love; and I swear that either one of us might have broken the current, and said good night. At last he came and put his arms around me and said: ‘We’re both lonely people, let’s be good to each other.’ I noted there was a touch of sullenness as he said it, but chose not to hear it (*5). I’d forgotten what making love with a real man is like. And I’d forgotten what it was like to lie in the arms of a man one loves. I’d forgotten what it was like to be in love like this, so that a step on the stair makes one’s heart beat, and the warmth of his shoulder against my palm is all the joy there is in life.

That was a week ago. I can say nothing about it except that I was happy. (*6) I am so happy, so happy. I find myself sitting in my room, watching the sunlight on the floor, and I’m in the state that I reach after hours of concentration with ‘the game’ — a calm and delightful ecstasy, a oneness with everything, so that a flower in a vase is oneself, and the slow stretch of a muscle is the confident energy that drives the universe. (*7) And Saul is relaxed, a different person from the man who walked into my flat, tense and suspicious, and my state of apprehension is gone, the sick person who inhabited my body for (*8) a while has vanished.

I read the last paragraph as if it were written about someone else. The night after I wrote it, Saul did not come down into my room to sleep. There was no explanation, he simply did not come. He nodded, cool and stiff, and went upstairs. I lay awake and thought of how, when a woman begins making love with a new man, a creature is born in her, of emotional and sexual responses, that grows in its own laws, its own logic. That creature in me was snubbed by Saul’s quietly going up to bed, so that I could see it quiver, and then fold itself up and begin to shrink. Next morning, we had coffee, and I looked across the table at him (he was extraordinarily white and tense-looking) and I realized that if I said to him, Why didn’t you come to my room last night, why didn’t you make some kind of explanation for not coming, he would frown and go hostile.

Later that day he came into my room and made love to me. It wasn’t real love-making, he had decided he would make love. The creature inside me who is the woman in love was not implicated, refused to be lied to.