I heard Saul’s feet coming up the stairs, and I was interested to know who would come in. As soon as I saw him, although he looked ill and tired, I knew the devils would not be in my room that day; and perhaps never again, because I also knew what he planned to say.

He sat on the edge of my bed and said: ‘It’s funny that you should have been laughing. I was thinking about you while I was walking around.’

I saw how he had been walking through the streets, walking through the chaos of his imagination, clutching at ideas or sets of words to save him. I said: ‘Well, what were you thinking?’ — waiting for the pedagogue to speak.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘Because you’ve been rushing about a crazy city, making sets of moral axioms to save us both with, like mottoes out of Christmas crackers.’

He said drily: ‘It’s a pity you know me so well, I thought I was going to astonish you with my self-control and brilliance. Yes, I suppose mottoes out of Christmas crackers is just it.’

‘Well, let’s have them.’

‘In the first place, you don’t laugh enough, Anna. I’ve been thinking. Girls laugh. Old women laugh. Women of your age don’t laugh, you’re all too damned occupied with the serious business of living.’

‘But I was in fact laughing my head off — I was laughing about free women.’ I told him the plot of my short story, he sat listening, smiling wryly. Then he said: ‘That’s not what I meant, I meant really laughing.’

‘I’ll put it on my agenda.’

‘No, don’t say it like that. Listen Anna, if we don’t believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there’s no hope for us. We’re going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas.’

‘We’ve got to believe in our blueprints?’

‘We’ve got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.’

‘Right. What next?’

‘Secondly, you can’t go on like this, you’ve got to start writing again.’

‘Obviously if I could, I would.’

‘No, Anna, that’s not good enough. Why don’t you write that short story you’ve just told me about? No, I don’t want all that hokum you usually give me — tell me, one simple sentence, why not. You can call it Christmas cracker mottoes if you like, but while I was walking about I was thinking that if you could simplify it in your mind, boil it down to something, then you could take a good long look at it and beat it.’

I began to laugh, but he said: ‘No, Anna, you’re going to really crack up unless you do.’

‘Very well then. I can’t write that short story or any other, because at that moment I sit down to write, someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulder, and stops me.’