But I saw this not merely as denying Anna, but as denying life itself. I thought that somewhere here is a fearful trap for women, but I don’t yet understand what it is. For there is no doubt of the new note women strike, the note of being betrayed. It’s in the books they write, in how they speak, everywhere, all the time. It is a solemn, self-pitying organ note. It is in me, Anna betrayed, Anna unloved, Anna whose happiness is denied, and who says, not: Why do you deny me, but why do you deny life?

When Saul came back he stood efficient and aggressive, his eyes narrowed, and he said: ‘I’m going out.’ And I said: ‘All right.’ He went out, the prisoner escaping.

I lay where I was, exhausted with the effort of not caring that he had to be the escaping prisoner. My emotions had switched off, but my mind ran on, making images, like a film. I was checking the images, or scenes as they went past, for I was able to recognize them as fantasies common to a certain kind of person now, out of common stock, shared by millions of people. I saw an Algerian soldier stretched on a torture bed; and I was also him, wondering how long I could hold out. I saw a communist in a communist jail, but the jail was certainly in Moscow, but this time the torture was intellectual, this time the holding out was a fight inside the terms of Marxist dialectic. The end-point of this scene was where the communist prisoner admitted, but after days of argument, that he took his stand on individual conscience, that moment when a human being says: ‘No, that I can’t do.’ At which point the communist jailor merely smiled, there was no need to say, Then you have confessed yourself to be at fault. Then I saw the soldier in Cuba, the soldier in Algeria, rifle in hand, on guard. Then the British conscript, pressed into war in Egypt, killed for futility. Then a student in Budapest, throwing a home-made bomb at a great black Russian tank. Then a peasant, somewhere in China, marching in a procession millions strong.

These pictures flicked in front of my eyes. I thought that five years ago the pictures would have been different, and that in five years they would be different again; but that now they were what bound people, of a certain kind, unknown to each other as individuals, together.

When the images stopped creating themselves, I checked them again, named them. It occurred to me that Mr Mathlong had not presented himself. I thought that a few hours ago I had actually been the mad Mr Themba, and with no conscious effort on my part. I said to myself I would be Mr Mathlong, I would make myself be this figure. I set the stage in every possible way. I tried to imagine myself, a black man in white occupied territory, humiliated in his human dignity. I tried to imagine him, at mission school, and then studying in England. I tried to create him, and I failed totally. I tried to make him stand in my room, a courteous, ironical figure, but I failed. I told myself I had failed because this figure, unlike all the others, had a quality of detachment. He was the man who performed actions, played roles, that he believed to be necessary for the good of others, even while he preserved an ironic doubt about the results of his actions. It seemed to me that this particular kind of detachment was something we needed very badly in this time, but that very few people had it, and it was certainly a long way from me.