‘But you were serious?’

Anna suppressed an impulse to turn it off with a joke, and said: ‘Yes, I was serious.’

‘Yes, I know you were. So I thought about what you said. There was something arrogant in it.’

‘Arrogant?’

‘Yes, I think so. Both the times I came to see you, you talked, and when I put together all the things you said, it sounds to me like arrogance. Like a kind of contempt.’

The other two, Molly and Richard, were now sitting back, smiling, lighting cigarettes, being excluded, exchanging looks.

But Anna, remembering the sincerity of this boy’s appeal to her, had decided to jettison even her old friend Molly, for the time being at least.

‘If it sounded like contempt, then I don’t think I can have explained it right.’

‘Yes. Because it means you haven’t got confidence in people. I think you’re afraid.’

‘What of?’ asked Anna. She felt very exposed, particularly before Richard, and her throat was dry and painful.

‘Of loneliness. Yes I know that sounds funny, for you, because of course you choose to be alone rather than to get married for the sake of not being lonely. But I mean something different. You’re afraid of writing what you think about life, because you might find yourself in an exposed position, you might expose yourself, you might be alone.’

‘Oh,’ said Anna, bleakly. ‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes. Or if you’re not afraid, then it’s contempt. When we talked about politics, you said the thing you’d learned from being a communist was that the most terrible thing of all was when political leaders didn’t tell the truth. You said that one small lie could spread into a marsh of lies and poison everything — do you remember? You talked about it for a long time … well then. You said that about politics. But you’ve got whole books you’ve written for yourself which no one ever sees. You said you believed that all over the world there were books in drawers, that people were writing for themselves — and even in countries where it isn’t dangerous to write the truth. Do you remember, Anna? Well, that’s a sort of contempt.’ He had been looking, not at her, but directing towards her an earnest, dark, self-probing stare. Now he saw her flushed, stricken face, but he recovered himself, and said hesitantly: ‘Anna, you were saying what you really thought, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’