We lay a long time, silent. He was gently stroking my arm. The sound of lorries along the street below was loud. With the gentle caress on my arm, I could feel the tension leave me. All the madness and the hate had gone. And then another of the long, slowly darkening afternoons, cut off from the world, and the long dark night. The flat is like a ship floating on a dark sea, it seems to float, isolated from life, self-contained. We played the new records, and made love, and the two people, Saul and Anna, who were mad, were somewhere else, in another room somewhere.

(*17) We have had a week of being happy. The telephone has not rung. No one has been. We have been alone. But it’s over now, a switch has been turned in him, and so I sit and write. I see I’ve written — happiness. That’s enough. It’s no use his saying, you manufacture happiness like molasses. During the week I had no desire to come near this table with the notebooks. There was nothing to say.

Today we got up late, and played records and made love. Then he went upstairs to his room. He came down, his face like a hatchet, and I looked at it and knew the switch had been turned. He strode around the room and said: ‘I’m restless, I’m restless.’ It was full of antagonism, so I said: ‘Then go out.’ ‘If I go out, you’ll accuse me of sleeping with someone.’ ‘Because that’s what you want me to do.’ ‘Well I’m going.’ ‘Go then.’ He stood looking at me, full of hate, and I felt the muscles of my stomach tighten, and the cloud of anxiety settle down like a dark fog. I watched the week of being happy slide away. I was thinking: In a month Janet will be home and this Anna will cease to exist. If I know I can switch off this helpless sufferer because it is necessary for Janet, then I can do it now. Why don’t I? Because I don’t want to, that’s why. Something has to be played out, some pattern has to be worked through … He felt I had withdrawn from him, and he became anxious and said: ‘Why should I go if I don’t want to?’ ‘Then don’t go,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and work,’ he said, abrupt, with a frown. He went out. In a few minutes he came down and leant against the door. I had not moved. I was sitting on the floor waiting for him because I knew he would come down. It was getting dark, the big room full of shadows, the sky turning colour. I had sat watching the sky fill with colour as the dark came into the streets, and without trying I had gone into the detachment of ‘the game’. I was part of the terrible city and the millions of people, and I was simultaneously sitting on the floor and above the city, looking down at it. When Saul came in, he said, leaning against the door-frame, accusing: ‘I’ve never been like this before, so tied to a woman I can’t even go for a walk without feeling guilty.’ His tone was remote from how I felt, so I said: ‘You’ve been here for a week, without my asking you. You wanted to. Now your mood has changed. Why should my mood change too?’ He said carefully: ‘A week’s a long time.’ I realized from how he said it, that until I used the words, a week, he had not known how many days had passed. I was curious to know how long he thought it was, but was afraid to ask. He was standing frowning, looking at me sideways, plucking at his lips as if they were a musical instrument. He said, after a pause, his face twisted into cunning: ‘But it was only the day before yesterday that I saw that film.’ I knew what he was doing: he wanted to pretend that the week was two days, partly to see if I was convinced it had been a week, and partly because he hated the idea he had given any woman a week of himself. It was getting dark in the room, and he was peering to see my face. The light from the sky made his grey eyes shine, his square blond head glisten. He looked like an alert threatening animal. I said: ‘You saw the film a week ago.’