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variable. She would sigh for the sun, but when it came it did not always meet with her approval. ‘Just pull that curtain, would you? I can’t stand a glare in my eyes.’ This from a woman who could spend twenty minutes to half an hour examining her face in the light of the bulbs round her dressing-room mirror. But I have heard many women sighing for the sun, and I am inclined to take their longing seriously. What they are really saying is, ‘I am weary, even frightened. I look tired, and plain. Why have I changed so? Is it age that is doing this to me, or is it just the winter? If only the summer would come! Then I might look young again!’ For the sun is the symbol of all that has been lost, a great capricious god who might restore one to oneself, if only he were so minded. I too sighed for the sun, and I had reason to in those cruel dark rooms which I knew I could never transform into anything of my own. It was a relief to go to Onslow Square, although I found Julia’s flat almost equally unwelcoming. She liked colours which contained no warmth, and the white curtains and the mustard walls, the white carpet and the white and yellow lilies in the enormous vases of clear glass seemed to reduce the temperature, which was always chilly, even further. She had some quarrelwith the central heating, so that more often than not it had to be turned off completely. When it was stone-cold Maureen was despatched to the telephone to summon assistance. If none came, they would sit there, resigned, until Charlie came home, when all that was needed was someone to make the most minor adjustments, which they could easily have done for themselves. They could even fail to understand that they had to turn the knob and switch on the radiators. I myself have performed this function times without number. ‘You’re so clever, Fay,’ Julia would say. ‘What should we do without you?’
    I was no longer happy, and in the restless state that this realization brought into being it was a welcome reprieve for me to sit in Julia’s drawing-room, uncomfortable though it was, and cold as it even more frequently was, and to calm myself down in the atavistic pleasure of purely female company. It is a resource of women to exclude men from time to time, to take a break from being on the alert and looking one’s best. It is a resource which can outlive its usefulness, as alliances are made and broken, and jealousies begin to peak. But at that particular period of my life, when Owen was away and winter turned the rooms in Gertrude Street into malevolent caves I would hurry round to Onslow Square as if to a sanctuary, a harem or zenana, where the half-maternal instincts of women could be deployed and the vagaries of men seen for what they really were. Women in such a situation will unite in deploring the childishness of men, their deceptions, and their frivolity, although, if questioned by an outsider, all would pride themselves on having such a fragile creature as their protector. Unmarried women come off worst in such company, and I began to feel sorry for Maureen, although I had never liked her, and I did not find that she improved on acquaintance.
    Maureen, Julia’s slave, was about thirty-five at this time and thus considerably younger than the rest of us—Julia, her mother, Mrs Chesney, Julia’s former dresser, and myself. Maureen struck me as fairly hysterical in her devotion to Julia, who was dependent on her but who probably liked her as little as I did. Maureen was simply not very likeable, an eager hapless creature with permed hair and rimless glasses, usually dressed in a pair of shapeless navy blue trousers and a fairly juvenile sweater which she had knitted herself. Maureen’s furious knitting was an accompaniment to Julia’s more tasteless revelations: bent over the needles Maureen could thus hide the blushes which rose in unison with her nervous laughter. One stubby finger, with a childishly bitten nail, would push her glasses back