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outside a charmed circle. Now they did not matter: Davidson would have been an ally at that dinner; so was Gilbert, brandishing his name.
    When Gilbert drove me home I had drunk enough to be talkative and my spirits were still high. We had each been angry at the dinner and now we spoke out, Gilbert not so anxious as I about the future but more enraged; his fighting spirit heartened me, and it was a long time since I had become so buoyant and reassured.
    In that mood I entered the bedroom, where Sheila was lying reading, her book near the bedside lamp, as it had been the evening we quarrelled over Robinson: but now the rest of the room was in darkness, and all I could see was the lamp, the side of her face, her arm coming from the shoulder of her nightdress.
    I sat on my bed, starting to tell her of the purgatorial dinner – and then I became full of desire.
    She heard it in my voice, for she turned on her elbow and stared straight at me.
    ‘So that’s it, is it?’ she said, cold but not unfriendly, trying to be kind.
    On her bed, just as I was taking her, too late to consider her, I saw her face under mine, a line between her eyes carved in the lamplight, her expression worn and sad.
    Then I lay beside her, on us both the heaviness we had known often, I the more guilty because I was relaxed, because, despite the memory of her frown, I was basking in the animal comfort of the nerves.
    In time I asked: ‘Anything special the matter?’
    ‘Nothing much,’ she said.
    ‘There is something?’
    For an instant I was pleased. It was some sadness of her own, different from that which had fallen on us so many nights, lying like this.
    Then I would rather have had the sadness we both knew – for she turned her head into my shoulder, so that I could not watch her face, and her body pulsed with sobbing.
    ‘What is the matter?’ I said, holding her to me. She just shook her head.
    ‘Anything to do with me?’ Another shake.
    ‘What then?’
    In a desperate and rancorous tone, she said: ‘I’ve been weak-minded.’
    ‘What have you done?’
    ‘You knew that I’d been playing with some writing. I didn’t show it to you, because it wasn’t for you.’
    The words were glacial, but I held her and said, ‘Never mind.’
    ‘I’ve been a fool. I’ve let R S R know.’
    ‘Does that matter much?’
    ‘It’s worse than that, I’ve let him get it out of me.’
    I told her that it was nothing to worry about, that she must harden herself against a bit of malice, which was the worst that could happen. All the time I could feel her anxiety like a growth inside her, meaningless, causeless, unreachable. She scarcely spoke again, she could not explain what she feared, and yet it was exhausting her so much that, as I had known happen to her before in the bitterness of dread, she went to sleep in my arms.

 
     
7:   Triumph of R S Robinson
     
    WHEN Sheila asked Robinson for her manuscript back, he spent himself on praise. Why had she not written before? This was short, but she must continue with it. He has always suspected she had a talent. Now she had discovered it, she must be ready to make sacrifices.
    Reporting this to me, she was as embarrassed and vulnerable as when she confessed that she had let him blandish the manuscript out of her. She had never learned to accept praise, except about her looks. Hearing it from Robinson she felt half-elated, she was vain enough for that, and half-degraded.
    Nevertheless, he had not been ambivalent; he had praised with a persistence he had not shown since he extracted her promise of help. There was no sign of the claw beneath. It made nonsense of her premonition, that night in my arms.
    Within a fortnight, there was a change. A new rumour was going round, more detailed and factual than any of the earlier ones. It was that Sheila had put money into Robinson’s firm (one version which reached me multiplied the amount by three) but not really to help the arts or out of benevolence. In