So that I watched, for an immense time, noting every movement, how Mrs Boothby stood in the kitchen of the hotel at Mashopi, her stout buttocks projecting like a shelf under the pressure of her corsets, patches of sweat dark under her armpits, her face flushed with distress, while she cut cold meat off various joints of animal and fowl, and listened to the young cruel voices and crueller laughter through a thin wall. Or I heard Willi’s humming, just behind my ear, the tuneless, desperately lonely humming; or watched him in slow motion, over and over again, so that I could never forget it, look long and hurt at me when I flirted with Paul. Or I saw Mr Boothby, the portly man behind the bar, look at his daughter with her young man. I saw his envious, but un-bitter gaze at this youth, before he turned away his eyes, and stretched out his hand to take an empty glass and fill it. And I saw Mr Lattimore, drinking in the bar, carefully not-looking at Mr Boothby, while he listened to his beautiful red-haired wife’s laughter. I saw him, again and again, bend down, shaky with drunkenness, to stroke the feathery red dog, stroking it, stroking it. ‘Get it?’ said the projectionist, and ran another scene. I saw Paul Tanner coming home in the early morning, brisk and efficient with guilt, saw him meet his wife’s eyes, as she stood in front of him in a flowered apron, rather embarrassed and pleading, while the children ate their breakfast before going off to school. Then he turned, frowning, and went upstairs to lift a clean shirt down from a shelf. ‘Get it?’ said the projectionist. Then the film went very fast, it flicked fast, like a dream, on faces I’ve seen once in the street, and have forgotten, on the slow movement of an arm, on the movement of a pair of eyes, all saying the same thing — the film was now beyond my experience, beyond Ella’s, beyond the notebooks, because there was a fusion, and instead of seeing separate scenes, people, faces, movements, glances, they were all together, the film became immensely slow again, it became a series of moments where a peasant’s hand bent to drop seed into earth, or a rock stood glistening while water slowly wore it down, or a man stood on a dry hillside in the moonlight, stood eternally, his rifle ready on his arm. Or a woman lay awake in darkness, saying No, I won’t kill myself, I won’t, I won’t.

The projectionist now being silent, I called to him, It’s enough, and he didn’t answer, so I leaned out my own hand to switch off the machine. Still asleep, I read words off a page I had written: That was about courage, but not the sort of courage I have ever understood. It’s a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won’t accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won’t accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything.

I looked at these words which I had written, and of which I felt critical; and then I took them to Mother Sugar. I said to her: ‘We’re back at the blade of grass again, that will press up through the bits of rusted steel a thousand years after the bombs have exploded and the world’s crust has melted. Because the force of will in the blade of grass is the same as the small painful endurance. Is that it? (I was smiling sardonically in my dream, wary of a trap.)