To say that I then felt free to fall in love puts it too simply. That was an aspect of the matter. A pair of blinkers which had kept me narrowly to a single task had been removed. I suddenly saw much more of the world. I rested. Or at least I tried to. The habit of relentless activity is hard to break. Yes, I was ready to fall in love. But I did not fall in love with just anybody, I fell in love with Anne, in spite of there being every reason why I ought not to, because those shining clever gentle eyes somehow, and from the very first moment, looked right into my soul and I felt myself known for the first time in my life. Of course Crystal knew me, but Crystal and I were so much jumbled up together that it might be more accurate to say that Crystal was me. There was no element of discrimination and shaping judgment. Anne met me as a stranger, saw me as a stranger, and miraculously understood me. Her presence made me rest, every muscle, every atom, became quiet and relaxed. I lived, I saw, I was. Time, which had been a clock ticking away the dangerous moments of my urgent trial, the test I simply must not fail, suddenly became silent and huge. It was not that, at first at any rate, we had any very significant talk. Her presence simply gave me some absolute calm joy which I did not at first recognize as a form of love.

It was not until the beginning of the Hilary Term that I put it to myself that I was really in love for the first time, that this was it, that I had fallen madly in love with Anne Jopling. The discovery that one is in love is automatically delightful, unless there are very strong contrary factors. There were strong contrary factors'. She was the wife of a man I liked and respected and who was by way of being my benefactor. She was happily married. She was not in love with me. But since I did not envisage any attempt to seduce her or indeed to bother her at all with the news of my extraordinary condition, I felt free to enjoy it privately, to experience that amazing enlargement of the world, its mythical transformation, its beatification, which being in love brings about. Of course I was also a martyr, I was pierced and pinned, I writhed in agony. I went about Oxford in a secret daze of pain and joy, not thinking of the future at all, and certainly not even remotely meditating upon the capture of the beloved. Then one day she kissed me.

Of course this was not the first time. Grown-up Oxford kisses a lot, in a way which surprised and rather shocked me when I was first made free of that rather peculiar society. Oxford is a very hedonistic place. (I am told Cambridge is quite different.) At dinner parties, even at cocktail parties, people who scarcely know each other embrace and kiss. Anne surprised me very much by kissing my cheek on the second occasion of my being invited to dinner. I was then not yet in love, or at any rate not aware of it. I can still vividly recall the unexpected fresh touch of those lips upon my cheek, suddenly in the porch of that big house, in the summer dark nearly twenty years ago. But that, as I say, was the sort of kiss which everyone at Oxford was constantly bestowing and receiving, and meant absolutely nothing.

The serious kiss happened in my rooms on the second of March; it was the sixth week of the Hilary Term. By then it was a custom that she would come sometimes to bring me things, stuff for the rooms, curtain hooks, picture hooks, ashtrays, a little cushion. She did this for other people too, she enjoyed giving little presents and 'mothering' the younger bachelor dons. She had (perhaps unwisely? She and Gunnar often discussed this) given up her own academic career. (She too had got her 'first'.) There was only one child, though they ardently hoped for more. Anne had time and creative energy to spare. I had by now been fully in love for over a month. I had managed to do my teaching and behave like a sane person, only my social life, such as it was, had completely ceased as I had to stay in my rooms all the time in case Anne should decide to call. On this day, it was about eleven o'clock in the morning and the sun was shining. I had a pupil, but I dismissed him as soon as Anne turned up. She chided me for this. She had brought me some blotting paper. (I had once complained that somehow or other I never seemed to have any.) She had brought a large packet of sheets of different colours. She pulled the package open and displayed the sheets on my table fanwise, laughing. I offered her some sherry, and she refused, saying it was too early and anyway she was in a rush and must go now. I had not seen her for six days, during which time I had not left my room except for dashes to the dining hall. Now she had come and was at once proposing to go. We were both standing leaning against the mantelpiece, she admiring her fan of blotting paper, I staring at her. She was making some jest and laughing. Then she turned to me, and stopped laughing. Of course my expression was unmistakable and concealment was at an end. I suppose in the agony of that threatened departure, I had deliberately brought it to an end. She looked at my grim face for a moment, then she kissed me on the lips.

I became instantly mad. I grasped her violently in my arms and drew her closely up against me and held her there in a blind ecstasy of motionless passion. I held her furiously in silence for what seemed ages and ages. She was at first quite still, then she began to struggle.

I slowly let her go. I saw her face, utterly and forever changed. I was still mad. I said, 'I love you. Will you come in here, will you come in here with me and lie down? Just for a moment. I want to hold you. I've never made love to anybody. Come in with me, please, please.'

She was marvellously direct. Her restraining controlling hand was still pressed against my shoulder. 'Hilary. I'm sorry. Stop this. Is it just that - you want to find out - if you can make love?'

'I love you, Anne. I worship you. I think about you all the time. I've never loved anyone else. I love you to insanity, to death, I can't help it. Oh don't go away from me, please, don't leave me.' I fell on my knees, grasping her legs, embracing her skirt and her mackintosh, pressing my head against her thigh.

'Hilary, get up. Get up!'

The door had very softly and quietly opened and like a cat entering Tristram had come into the room.

I got up.

Anne, her face blazing, turned quickly and took Tristram by the hand and disappeared out of the door.

Only after she had gone did I feel, in a sort of memory hallucination, her heart beating violently against my heart. I went into my bedroom and fell face downwards on the bed and lay there biting my hands and moaning.

I was to go to dinner with the Joplings three days later. The three days were three blanks of white hell with a few flashes of lurid joy. I had of course soon clarified the matter of the kiss. She had just kissed me out of impulsive kindness, out of the general happiness of her fulfilled life, out of the casual affection which such as she could easily spare for a deprived person such as me. The whole incident must be sealed off. That kiss too meant nothing. Except that Anne would not come to see me again. I was not even sure that I ought to go to dinner. I went because I had to. I had to see her. And when I saw her all clarification vanished. Eldridge was there and a visiting Italian scholar. We talked Italian. Anne's was even better than Gunnar's. She behaved as usual, except that, when I first arrived, her eyes showed consciousness of what had happened. It was also somehow mysteriously clear to me that she had said nothing to Gunnar. I had not even wondered in these three days whether she would have told her husband. I had forgotten Gunnar's existence. When I was leaving she kissed my cheek as usual. I pressed her hand hard, and then regretted this because it left me uncertain whether or not she had pressed mine.

Hell really began after that. Of course Anne would tell Gunnar sooner or later. I would never be invited or visited again. What was I going to do? I had now no serious occupation except thinking about Anne. I continued to teach and to eat, but I did these things in a coma, and in any case the term was now almost over. I avoided occasions of meeting Gunnar in college, though when we did meet he was perfectly friendly and ordinary. Then I heard someone say in hall that the Joplings were leaving for Italy as soon as the vacation began. I made myself even more of a hermit. Term ended and I sat in my rooms unable even to answer Crystal's letters. I did not reflect or speculate or make plans. I just suffered blankly from Anne's absence, like someone who is totally absorbed in a physical pain. There was nothing eke but this pain; except that sometimes I would feel a teasing urge to rush to her house and find out if she was still there. I sat in my armchair in my rooms and suffered. I did not even wait, I suffered. I wanted, if I wanted anything precise, enough days to have passed for me to be sure that she had left Oxford. Then one morning, again about eleven o'clock, she suddenly entered my room.

She came towards me and I took her in my arms at once. I could not speak. She was quiet for a moment, then began to release herself. 'Hilary. Please. Just listen to what I say, believe what I say and don't think there is anything else. We're going to Italy. I couldn't just go away. I thought I could. But I kept worrying about you. I couldn't leave without seeing you again. So, I just came to say good-bye. Just that. Don't suffer, oh don't suffer, don't - Good-bye - ' And she darted out of the door. I stood where I was, transmuted. Ah if only, if only she had not come! Without that visit I might have managed myself, have savaged my love into hopelessness and the saving lie of appearance. Without that, I would not have let myself believe in her interest, not felt again the complice beating of her heart with mine. As it was, I now had enough and more than enough to live on for the whole vacation. I knew now that I should see her again, that I should hold her in my arms again. I became suddenly blissfully happy. I could even work. Crystal came down and I drove her round the Gotswolds in the car. However I curtailed her visit and could not talk to her of the future. Of course I said nothing about Anne. I spent the rest of the vacation in my rooms, reading, working. I read poetry and enjoyed the grammar and the poems too. I luxuriated in Russian. I played with Turkish. I made progress in Hungarian. I prepared my lectures for next term. And now I waited.

The Joplings returned just before term. I met Anne in the quad. Gunnar was over near the gate, out of earshot, talking to the college organist. (He was a great arranger of concerts.) He waved to me. I waved back. I said to Anne, 'I've got to make love to you, I've got to, I don't care if I die afterwards, I've got to and I'm going to.' Gunnar approached across the grass. 'Hello, Hilary.' 'Hello. Had a nice time in Italy?' 'Marvellous. We were in Calabria. We nearly bought a farmhouse. Why don't you come in to dinner tomorrow? That would be OK, wouldn't it, Anne?' I went to dinner. I drove my ankle hard against Anne's under the table. She drew away. Three days later she came to my room.

It was on a Wednesday afternoon in the fourth week of Trinity Term that she gave in at last. She came first out of pity, so she said, and because she feared I might make some desperate move. I think if I had not told her that I was virgin and that it was bed I wanted, if I had talked more tenderly and sentimentally of being in love, she might have been able to resist. As it was, I think it began to seem to her something simple and quickly given, which she had and I needed, and which out of her generosity she would have to give me sooner or later. She wanted to show me that I could love a woman. In fact I never doubted that I could, but it helped both of us if I let her think of it in this way. I was totally in love, but I wanted to make love, to screw her, more urgently than I had ever wanted anything, and this was the role my love played to her, and the guise, which had its own sort of pseudo-innocence, in which it presented itself. Of course she understood the rest of it too and would not have consented had she not known that my whole being was her slave. But it was my pressing need that she met, not the rest. The rest could wait. We pretended that this huge love did not exist, while at the same time we knew that it was the only possible ground of our proceeding. And thus complicitly we cheated each other. In fact Anne was by this time, though she tried to conceal it, physically very much in love with me. I could hardly believe at first that this was so. What a black glory shone around when I realized it. I drew her like a magnet and she had to come to me. She flew south through Oxford, she flew to my rooms, distraught with need, dissolving into relieved joy as she entered. And still I talked simply of her kindness, my gratitude.

After the great holy enactment of that Wednesday afternoon, after we had dressed, we stood dazed, hand in hand, gazing haplessly as if we pitied each other, stunned by the immensity of the tornado which had picked us up and deposited us in another country. There was no simple thing now which was needed and could be given. We had created a maze and were lost. And now we could see the possibilities of pain, our pain and that of others. After Anne's first visit to me, after her return from Italy, I had put a complete stop to all Crystal's arrangements. Crystal had intended to spend most of Trinity Term in lodgings in Oxford. I told her it was impossible, there was no suitable accommodation, I was working too hard, everything would have to wait. Of course Crystal did not complain. I had cleared the decks for action, but what action was possible? What was there for me to do except to continue to beg a married woman to visit me in secret? In any case how much longer could it be secret? Anne visited lots of people, but it was still a fact that every time she crossed the quad dozens of curious eyes could mark where she went. We parted passionately, but without any plan. We could not bear even to talk of a plan. I heard nothing from her for a week.

At the end of the week I received a letter from her saying that we had better not meet again. I did not reply. I stayed in my rooms and waited. She came. We made love. It sounds as if it was a pretty heartless business. Any story can be told many ways; and there is a kind of justice in the fact that this one could be told cynically: a young wife and mother secretly amusing herself, a libertine deceiving his best friend, and so on. There is no escape here from damnation by the facts. I do not in any case want to excuse myself, but I do want to try to excuse Anne. It was all so complicated and it happened, not all at once, but in little movements each one of which seemed to have its own inevitability and its own sense. We were young and gripped by the awful compelling force of physical love. I was in total love from the start. Anne became so. She was sorry for me. Pity changed imperceptibly into enslaving fascination. She felt the grains of violence in me and yearned over them. I talked about my past. I told her things I had not told even to Crystal. She talked about her past. I could communicate with her, miraculously, totally. She saw me, she attended to me more than anyone had ever done, even Mr Osmand. It was like being seen by God. She bathed my hurt soul in a reviving dew. Yet at the same time we were both in hell. She suffered hideously. I saw her bright face changing, losing its joy, and I ground my teeth with despair and fury against the Fates. If only this woman were not married, if only things were different, if only - She did not want to come to me and yet she did and she came. She loved her husband and her son, but she loved me too and she desired me in a way in which (I suspect: she never said this) she had never desired her husband. We suffered so much together during that May and that June, and comforted each other, and resolved to part, and could not part, and wept.

Then one day she came and I knew at once from her face what had happened. Gunnar had found out. We never discovered how, but it would not have been difficult. He asked her and (as we had agreed she must) she told him. I did not ask her how he behaved. She went away from me in a misery such as I had never seen, like a dead woman walking. The next morning I got a letter from Gunnar which just said, Please leave Anne alone. Please. Then nothing for several days. Gunnar did not appear in College. Term came to an end. I was in a frenzy, but now there were dreadful hopes. I had no intention of giving her up. We had, as it were, waited for Gunnar's knowledge, as we had waited for Anne's surrender, treating these things as blank wall-like barriers beyond which things would have to change, beyond which it was fruitless to try to look beforehand. Now that this last one was past I knew that I must simply persuade Anne to come to me, to come to me forever, to break and abandon her marriage, and marry me instead. And I knew too, with the strength of the hold which I had at that moment on her being, that this was possible. I must, as a first move, simply take her away, kidnap her if necessary, be alone with her for a long time: for a long time without lies at last. Waiting was anguish now, since I felt that every hour which she remained with Gunnar was diminishing my power. On the fourth day I telephoned her and asked her to meet me in St John's garden. My college rooms were not safe any more. I met her and she cried for an hour. We hid ourselves in the wildest part of the garden and she cried and cried. I told her all that I felt, all that I intended. She was incoherent, practically hysterical. I was demented with distress. Nothing could be planned or even discussed.

The following evening at about nine o'clock she arrived in my rooms with a white rigid face, trembling and shuddering. I gave her some whisky and took a stiff drink myself. She said, 'I simply had to run out of the house.' This was what I had been waiting for. I said, 'I'll take you away. Come.' I seized a few things and threw them into a suitcase, then led her down the stairs and put her into my car. I was in a sweat of terror all the time in case Gunnar should turn up. Not that I feared any violence which he could put upon me, but I wanted to take this god-given chance to carry her right away while she was in a mood of absolute flight. I was trembling so much myself I could hardly start the car. Anne sat beside me in a trance, staring blankly ahead. As we careered through Headington towards the London road she said, 'Where are we going?' 'To London.' 'No - please - take me home - ' 'Certainly not. I am running away with you forever. I am your home now.' She began to cry. Before we got to the motorway she said, 'Hilary, stop please. There's something I've got to tell you.' 'There's nothing more to say, darling. We love each other. It's too late for regrets now. You're mine.' 'Stop, please, I've got to tell you something. Stop.'

I slowed down and drew the car into a lay-by. There was a blue midsummer dusky light, the sky still glowing but the earth darkening. I turned to her in the dimness. Passing cars, their headlights just switched on, momently revealed her face.

'Anne, darling, I love you. Don't leave me. You've come to me now, don't leave me, I should die.'

She put her arms round my neck with such a gesture of confidence and absolute love that for a moment all fear left me. Then pulling back she said, 'Hilary, it's no good.'

'Don't. I shall start the car. We've escaped, we're going on. You're mine.'

'No, no, listen. We can't go. I'm pregnant.'

I stared at her dim white face in the gathering darkness. I could not see her eyes, but I knew from the convulsive trembling of her body that she was crying. 'So soon,' I said. 'Well, surely that is it, the final bond between us. You can't leave me now. Are you sure?' I was however instinctively appalled.

'Yes. But Hilary, you haven't understood - '

'What - you mean - '

'Yes. It's not your child, it's Gunnar's.'

A flood of icy coldness filled my heart and my veins. I kept my voice hard and steady. 'You mean it might be?'

'No. It is. Because of the time. There isn't any doubt. I thought perhaps - but I kept wanting not to know. I only found out just now for certain - I thought it just couldn't be - and I really meant earlier to leave you - I meant to leave you as soon as Gunnar found out, I thought I'd have to - so I just - let things drift - and kept hoping it wasn't - and didn't go to the doctor - oh I've been so wicked, so stupid - '

'I see,' I said. 'You intended to leave me as soon as Gunnar found out. You never told me so.'

'I didn't intend anything. What could I do? I couldn't see what I would do. I'm caught. I love Gunnar. I love Tristram. It's my doom that I love you too. You don't know, even you don't know at all, what I've had to suffer in these last months - '

'You sound quite resentful,' I said, keeping the cool hard tone.

'I suppose I am in a way. I was so happy - before you came along.'

'Too bad. I was so happy before you came along too.'

'Then it's plain - isn't it - we must part - oh God - we must both try to be - as we were before - it's such agony - I'm sorry, my darling, I'm very very very sorry - Please will you drive me home? Oh my God, I do love you, I do love you - But it's just hopeless - ' She was shuddering and wailing.

I said, 'Does Gunnar know?'

'About the baby? Yes.'

If only she had lied at that point. If only she had not told me that as well.

'So he thinks you're tied to him - because of the bloody baby?'

'I am tied.'

'No,' I said. 'I'm afraid you aren't. You're wrong there. You're coming with me, baby and all. Wherever we're going now we're going together, my darling.' Fearful rage and misery possessed my body, making it violent, mechanical, precise. I started the car again and drove on.

'Hilary, please take me home, please, please, please - '

I said nothing. We came onto the motorway.

'Hilary, please don't drive so fast, do you want to kill us both - Hilary don't drive so fast - Hilary, Hilary - oh please please take me home - oh stop, stop, stop, don't drive so fast - '

The car crossed the central reservation at about a hundred miles an hour. It was a matter of chance which car on the other side we hit. We hit a Bentley driven by a stockbroker and travelling almost equally fast. Both cars were completely smashed and six other cars were severely damaged. The stockbroker escaped with two broken legs. No one else was badly hurt except me and Anne. I had multiple injuries. Anne died in hospital on the following day.

I never doubted that I had behaved wickedly. That knowledge I carried away with me into the years to come. But the thing itself as we lived it was such a complex of contradictions and misunderstandings and mistakes and little makeshifts and sheer blind muddled waiting and hoping. How could we know that it was wending its way to that end? I was dreadfully in love with the sort of black certain metaphysical love that cuts deeper than anything and thus seems its own absolute justification. On n'aime qu'une fois, la premiere. I think this is true of the one and only Eros. Though also perhaps the one and only Eros is not the greatest of all the gods. Anne was dreadfully in love too, but her love was crazed, crazed with the hopelessness of it all, which perhaps she saw and I did not. She loved her husband; and I could remember, even at the times of blackest glory, how happy she had been when I first met her; and I could see too how destroyed she was later, destroyed by me and by my terrible love.

I thought later on, as the years passed in almost uninterrupted meditation upon the events of that summer, that I had perhaps overestimated the force of her passion. It may have been so. Even if she had not discovered that she was pregnant would she ever really have decided to leave Gunnar and come to me? What went on between them after Gunnar found out? This I did not know or want to know. On the other hand, if I had not become mad with rage at what she told me, if I had simply driven her away with me on that night, was it conceivable that she would have stayed with me, would not her tears have forced me finally to take her home to Gunnar and Tristram? Of course she loved me, that could not be doubted. Perhaps she was impressed by the force of my love; being thus impressed is as good a cause of real love as another. If only she had not come back to me after that first kiss. If only she had not told me that Gunnar knew she was pregnant. That revelation had some sort of terrible importance at that moment. If she had not told me it would all have seemed a problem, an obstacle, something to be dealt with by me, I would not have been precipitated straight into fury and despair. There are those who hold that the world is well lost for love. I did not think this. I loved Anne with a concentration of my whole being which could only happen once. But I wished forever that I had not. I wished I had never met her. For the world was lost indeed, and I had lost it not only for myself but for Crystal.

I resigned my fellowship of course. Gunnar also resigned. He went into politics for a short time, contested a Labour seat, then entered the Civil Service and began to become a successful and famous man. I was (I think this describes it) ill for years. Not really mentally ill. I never thought I would go mad. But I was simply crushed, unmanned. I had lost my moral self-respect and with it my ability to control my life. Sin and despair are mixed and only repentance can change sin into pure pain. I could not clean the resentment out of my misery. Did I repent? That question troubled me as the years went by. Can something half crushed and bleeding repent? Can that fearfully complex theological concept stoop down into the real horrors of human nature? Can it, without God, do so? I doubt it. Can sheer suffering redeem? It did not redeem me, it just weakened me further. I, who had so long cried out for justice, would have been willing to pay, only I had nothing to pay with and there was no one to receive the payment. I knew I had killed Anne (and her unborn child) almost as surely as if I had hit her with an axe. The business was brilliantly hushed up by Gunnar. (No wonder he succeeded later in high level diplomacy.) He put it around that I was kindly giving Anne a lift to London. Later my name was dropped from the story altogether. I disappeared from Oxford as if I had never existed. Much later I heard someone say that Gunnar Jopling's first wife had died by crashing her car. I imagined that I would carry the placard Murderer around my neck forever. But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last.

Crystal of course was perfect. It was for a little while unclear whether I would live. I lived and completely recovered. Crystal sat by me for weeks and months. I did not tell her everything at once, but in the end I did tell her everything. She knew we were both done for. She was perfect. I could not work for a year, not because of my bodily health but because I was in despair. I suffered an agony of remorse about Anne which bit me physically, doubling me up for whole parts of the day. I had a problem about responsibility for the past which became a problem of identity. I mourned and mourned about the destruction of my hopes. The loss of Oxford, of learning and scholarship and improvement, the loss of Crystal's metamorphosis and Crystal's happiness. I went back to the north and lived for a year with Crystal in one room in the town where I was born. People who had known me and envied me came to survey with satisfaction the wreckage of clever ambitious fortunate Hilary Burde. (A pity Aunt Bill missed that. She would have loved it.) Mr Osmand had already left the town. I hoped he never heard. I wept over Crystal. She wept over me. She supported me by returning to work in the chocolate factory. To this day the smell of chocolate brings back the horror of that time.

It would of course have been possible to recover and to set out once more on the quest of all the things I wanted and had so largely got when I met Anne. Oxford would be impossible of course, but there were other universities where I could have set myself up, where I could have educated Crystal and lived something like the sort of life which I had coveted. It would have been possible to do this in the sense that someone else in similar circumstances might have been able to do it. I was not able. At any rate I did not do it. Paradoxically, I might have survived better alone. It was the thought of Crystal's suffering, her loss, her disappointment that was my chief millstone; and grief itself sapped the will to find any remedy. I just wanted to die, at least that was my mood. I could not loll myself because of Crystal. I wanted to hide. After the year in the north I went to London, as criminals and destroyed people do, because it is the best place to hide. And I hid. And Crystal came and hid with me. I got a job as a clerk in a car hire firm. I lost the job when I was required to do some driving. I had been banned from driving for life after the accident. I got a little job with an estate agent, then a little job in a local government office. At last I gravitated into the civil service, at the humble level at which I had remained ever since until I almost began to think of myself as an old man.

Gunnar had vanished from my life, as I imagined forever. As he became more important and successful I began to hear of him, to read about him in the newspapers, but though these reminders jabbed like daggers it was news of a stranger. Gunnar was a big international man, someone existing in Brussels, in Geneva, in Washington, in New York, never to cross my path again. I only saw him once after the accident. He came to see me in the hospital as soon as I was able to talk. (My jaw was smashed and speech was impossible for some time.) He was cold and civil and asked me, as if he were a police officer investigating some minor offence, to tell him about the accident. I told him; at least I told him the mechanical details, the speed of the car, the way it somersaulted. The crash had deprived me of consciousness and I did not see Anne after the moment of impact. He asked nothing more. He went away without any show of emotion, without any remark or look which could establish a connection between us. And at his cue I was equally cold. Later I went over and over this last meeting in my mind thinking of things I might have said. 'I'm sorry. Forgive me.' Yet how could I, without help from him, have said that? If only he had shown a flicker of emotion I could have burst out to him. But there was no emotion and no outburst. I thought later of writing to him, but I never wrote. Tristram committed suicide at the age of sixteen.

SATURDAY.

IT WAS Saturday morning. It was a cold day with a lot of low scurrying brown clouds and a bitterly cold wind and a few flashes of watery sun which simply showed up how wet and muddy London was. I had had bad dreams, most of which I had forgotten, the atmosphere of horror only remaining. Would that our sins had built-in qualities of oblivescence such as our dreams have. One dream I remembered. I was in a quiet awful place beside some water where some huge crime either had been committed in the past or would be committed in the future. Not knowing which was part of the dreadfulness of the dream.

This morning I heartily regretted having told Arthur. At the time I had felt relieved to tell. There had been an almost orgiastic satisfaction in doing so. I had sent Arthur out to get some wine, and I had drunk a great deal. This morning I felt terrible, sick and giddy and disgusted with myself. I ate three aspirins and drank a great deal of water. It was not that I doubted Arthur's discretion or that I minded his knowing. This knowledge, which would have been intolerable inside almost anyone else's head, was harmless in Arthur's. It just now seemed a terrible mistake to have relived it all. All that immodest spewing talk, all those eloquent emotional drunken words, had made the whole thing hideously more vivid. Even my dull stripped flat gave back the dreadful resonance. I had stripped the flat as I had stripped my life in a vain attempt to remove from it anything which could remind me of Anne. Today, opening my Polish dictionary, I found a pressed flower, a white violet, which she had espied in her garden and given me during that charmed and innocent time when I loved her and she did not yet know it.

The day began with a letter from Tommy.

Dear heart, I am sorry I was so useless last night and please forgive what I said about Laura Impiatt, I know that was just stupid. You know I love you and I want to marry you, but I want most of all to take pain away from you and I'm sure if you would only share your woes with me you would feel better. I can't believe that you ever did anything really bad, but even if you did I feel that you ought to forgive yourself. Guilt does no good to anyone, does it? Anyway I forgive you, on behalf of God. Won't you take that from me as a Christmas present? I feel I love you so much that I am able (and so on and so on) I thought it was rather touching of Tommy to offer me God's forgiveness for Christmas, especially as she did not know what I had done, and I realized that I was lucky to be loved by a girl as intelligent and nice as Tommy, but she was simply no use to me at all and I wished her at the devil.

The electricity was still off. The flat was extremely cold. I was wearing a jersey and an overcoat and felt awkward and bulky and still frozen. I burnt myself lighting a spirit stove to boil a kettle. Mr Pellow knocked on the door, asking if we could spare him a candle. I told him we could not. Later I caught Christopher sneaking out with a candle for Mr Pellow. I confiscated it. Christopher told me that Mick Ladderslow had been arrested in connection with the Steal for Chairman Mao Campaign, and would I perhaps put up some money to bail him out of prison? I would not. Christopher went away and started practising his tabla. I told him to shut up. He came back into the kitchen and broke the spirit stove by turning the handle too hard. I told him I had had enough of him and he could clear out, but he took no notice as I often said this. Jimbo Davis arrived looking spiritual and carrying some evergreen branches. He took my hand in an (or did I imagine it?) especially sympathetic way, murmuring 'yes, yes - ' He and Christopher retired into Christopher's room where they laughed a lot, doubtless at my expense.

Laura Impiatt arrived. I passionately did not want to see her, but had not the spirit to invent an immediate lie. ('Oh what a shame, I am just this moment leaving for Hounslow.') Today, although it was not raining, she was wearing a huge yellow sou'wester tied under the chin, a quilted mackintosh coat and blue serge trousers pulled in above her ankles with bicycle clips. She did not take her coat off. We sat at the kitchen table, two bulky cold muffled up objects with red noses. She wanted coffee but there was now no way of boiling a kettle. We peered at each other in the gloom.

'Hilary, will you be able to bear it if Crystal marries Arthur?'

'Don't be silly, Laura, just don't be silly, there's a dear.'

'I know how close you are to Crystal.'

'I want her to marry Arthur.'

'Then why were you almost mad with misery on Thursday?'

'I wasn't, I had toothache. Arthur is a splendid chap.'

'Arthur is not exactly a catch.'

'Beggars can't be choosers. Crystal is not exactly an English Rose.'

'I'm surprised to hear you talk like that about Crystal.'

'I can see what's obvious, even about my sister. She's lucky to have a suitor at all.'

'I would have expected you to be more sort of fastidious.'

'Who am I to be sort of fastidious.'

'But don't you care? And you can't be serious about marrying Tommy.'

'Who said I was marrying Tommy?'

'You did, on Thursday.'

'I was just saying anything that came into my head to shut you up.'

'How nice of you! You know, Hilary, you don't value yourself enough. There's so much of you and you make so little of it. It's as if you'd lost all your courage, just absolutely lost your nerve.'

'That's right.'

'But why? Hilary, you must tell me. It would do you good to tell it all to somebody. I know there's something. Hilary, let me help you. I love you, my dear, let me help. Don't just throw yourself away. I know you need a home, and you'll need it all the more if Crystal marries. Lean on me, use me. You know you have a home with us at Queen's Gate Terrace. It could be much more to you if only you'd open yourself a little. We are childless. Freddie's very fond of you - '

'Laura, I shall be sick.'

'Oh, my dear, I know you so well. I do. Just relax, you're all tense, you're so physically tense, relax, see, your hands are all knotted up - '

'It's so bloody cold.'

Laura had taken one of my hands and was kneading it enthusiastically between her own. Her hands in fact were so cold that the process, even if I had cared for it in general, would have brought little relief. I closed my eyes in an absolute gesture of despair. I wanted to scream at Laura, to terrify her. Anne's face appeared with a hallucinatory clarity in the domed darkness, as if cast by a magic lantern onto the London night sky. I must write my letter of resignation. I must do it this morning. I must be gone before he arrived. The 'I'm sorry' which I could not say to him had been said often enough since, but it did no good, there was no one to listen.

At that moment the electricity suddenly came on and the kitchen leapt into bright light. The boys cheered. I removed my hand from Laura's cold clasp.

The front door bell rang. I went to the door. It was the telephone engineer. I stared at him stupidly.

'It's the boss in person. Hello.'

'But the telephone,' I said. 'You've done all that, haven't you? There's nothing more to do, is there? It's all gone away.'

'Telephone? What's that? I'm not on duty.'

'What?'

'This is a social call, man. I'm here as Len, not for Her Majesty.'

'You want Christopher.'

'This is where we came in.'

'What?'

'You just said "you want Christopher". That's what you said to me the first time.'