His face cleared, he sat down on my bed, and he said, with the simplicity he can switch into from one moment to the next: ‘The trouble is, when we took each other on, you took fidelity for granted, and I didn’t. I’ve never been faithful to anyone. It didn’t arise.’

‘Liar,’ I said. ‘You mean, when a woman began to care about you, or found you out, you simply moved on to the next.’

He gave his frank young laugh, instead of the hostile young laugh and said: ‘And perhaps there’s something in that, too.’

I was on the point of saying, Then move on. I was wondering why I didn’t, what sort of personal logic I was following, through him. During the flash of a second, when I almost said: Then move on, he gave me a quick, frightened glance, and said: ‘You should have told me that it mattered to you.’

I said: ‘Then I’m telling you now that it matters to me.’

‘OK,’ he said, carefully, after a pause. His face had the furtive cunning look. I knew perfectly well what he was thinking.

Today he went out for a couple of hours, after a telephone call, and I went straight upstairs to read the recent entries in his diary. ‘Anna’s jealousy is driving me mad. Saw Marguerite. Went home with her. A nice kid.’ ‘Marguerite cold to me. Met Dorothy at her house. I’ll sneak out when Anna goes to visit Janet next week. When the cat’s away!’

I read this with cold triumph.

And yet, in spite of this, there are hours of affectionate friendliness, while we talk and talk. And we make love. We sleep together every night, and it’s a marvellous deep sleep. Then the friendliness switches to hate in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes the flat is an oasis of loving affection, then suddenly it’s a battleground, even the walls vibrate with hate, we circle around each other like two animals, the things we say to each other are so terrible that thinking about them afterwards I am shocked. And yet we are quite capable of saying these things, listening to what we’ve said, and then bursting out into laughter so that we laugh and roll on the floor.

I went down to see Janet. All the way I was miserable because I knew Saul was making love to Dorothy, whoever she was. I was unable to shake this off when with Janet. She seems happy — remote from me, a little schoolgirl, absorbed in her friends. Coming back in the train, I thought again how strange it is — for twelve years, every minute of every day has been organized around Janet, my timetable has been her needs. And yet she goes to school, and that’s that, I instantly revert to an Anna who never gave birth to Janet. I remember Molly saying the same thing: Tommy went for a holiday with some friends when he was sixteen, and she spent days walking around the house astonished at herself. ‘I feel as if I’d never had a child at all,’ she kept saying.