He nodded coldly at Anna, laid his hand briefly on his son’s shoulder, which was unresponsive, and went out. At once Tommy got up, and said: ‘I’ll go up to my room.’ He walked out, his head poked forward, a hand fumbling at the door-knob, the door opened just far enough to take his width: he seemed to squeeze himself out of the room; and they heard his regular thumping footsteps up the stairs.

‘Well,’ said Molly.

‘Well,’ said Anna, prepared to be challenged.

‘It seems a lot of things have been going on while I was away.’

‘For one thing, it seems I said things to Tommy I shouldn’t.’

‘Or not enough.’

Anna said with an effort: ‘Yes I know you want me to talk about artistic problems and so on. But for me it’s not like that …’ Molly merely waited, looking sceptical, and even bitter. ‘If I saw it in terms of an artistic problem, then it’d be easy, wouldn’t it? We could have ever such intelligent chats about the modern novel.’ Anna’s voice was full of irritation, and she tried smiling to soften it.

‘What’s in those diaries then?’

‘They aren’t diaries.’

‘Whatever they are.’

‘Chaos, that’s the point.’

Anna sat watching Molly’s thick white fingers twist together and lock. The hands were saying: Why do you hurt me like this? — but if you insist then I’ll endure it.

‘If you wrote one novel, I don’t see why you shouldn’t write another,’ said Molly, and Anna began to laugh, irresistibly, while her friend’s eyes filled with sudden tears.

‘I wasn’t laughing at you.

‘You simply don’t understand,’ said Molly, determinedly muffling the tears. ‘It’s always meant so much to me that you should produce something, even if I didn’t.’

Anna nearly said, stubbornly, ‘But I’m not an extension of you,’ but knew it was something she might have said to her mother, so stopped herself. Anna could remember her mother very little; she had died so early; but at moments like these, she was able to form for herself the image of somebody strong and dominating, whom Anna had had to fight.

‘You get so angry over certain subjects I don’t know how to begin,’ said Anna.

‘Yes, I’m angry. I’m angry. I’m angry about all the people I know who fritter themselves away. It’s not only you. It’s lots of people.’

‘While you were away something happened that interested me. Remember Basil Ryan — the painter, I mean.’

‘Of course. I used to know him.’