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regretted love. One day I thought: if I wasn ’ t on this island I should be dropping this girl. The writing of the letters had become as often as not more of a chore than a pleasure, and I didn ’ t hurry back to my room after dinner to write them – I scribbled them off hurriedly in class and got a boy to run down to the gate at the last minute to give them to the school postman.
    At half-term I went with Demetriades to Athens. He wanted to take me to his favourite brothel, in a suburb. He assured me the girls were clean. I hesitated, then – isn ’ t it a poet ’ s, to say nothing of a cynic ’ s, moral duty to be immoral? – I went. When we came out, it was raining, and the shadowing wet leaves on the lower branches of a eucalyptus, caught under a light in the entrance, made me remember our bedroom in Russell Square. But Alison and London were gone, dead, exorcized; I had cut them away from my life. I decided I would write a letter to Alison that night, to say that I didn ’ t want to hear from her again. I was too drunk by the time we got back to the hotel, and I don ’ t know what I would have said. Perhaps that I had proved beyond doubt that I was not worth waiting for; perhaps that she bored me; perhaps that I was lonelier than ever – and wanted to stay that way. As it was, I sent her a postcard telling her nothing; and on the last day I went back to the brot hel alone. But the Lebanese nym phet I coveted was taken, and I didn ’ t fancy the others.
    December came, and we were still writing letters. I knew she was hiding things from me. Her life, as she described it, was too simple and manless to be true. When the final letter came, I was not surprised. What I hadn ’ t expected was how bitter I should feel, and how betrayed. It was less a sexual jealousy of the man than an envy of Alison; moments of tenderness and togetherness, moments when the otherness of the other disappeared, flooded back through my mind for days afterwards, like sequences from some cheap romantic film that I certainly didn ’ t want to remember, but did; and there was the read and re-read letter; and that such things could be ended so, by two hundred stale, worn words.
    Dear Nicholas,
    I can ’ t go on any more. I ’ m so sorry if this hurts you. Please believe that I ’ m sorry, please don ’ t be angry with me for knowing you will be hurt. I can hear you saying, I ’ m not hurt.
    I got so terribly lonely and depressed. I haven ’ t told you how much, I can ’ t tell you how much. Those first days I kept up such a brave front at work, and then at home I collapsed.
    I ’ m sleeping with Pete again when he ’ s in London. It started two weeks ago. Please please believe me that I wouldn ’ t be if I thought … you know. I know you know. I don ’ t feel about him as I used to do, and I don ’ t begin to feel about him as I felt about you, you cant be jealous.
    It ’ s just he ’ s so uncomplicated, he stops me thinking, he stops me being lonely, I ’ ve sunk back into all the old Aus tralians-in-London thing again. We may marry. I don ’ t know.
    It ’ s terrible. I still want to write to you, and you to me. I keep on remembering.
    Goodbye.
    ALISON
    You will be different for me. Always. That very first letter I wrote the day you left. If you could only understand.
    I wrote a letter in reply to say that I had been expecting her letter, that she was perfectly free. But I tore it up. If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.
    8

    I was hopelessly unhappy in those last few days before the Christmas holidays. I began to loathe the school irrationally: the way it worked and the way it was planted, blind and prisonlike, in the heart of the divine landscape. When Alison ’ s letters stopped, I was also increasingly isolated in a more conventional way. The outer world, England, London, became absurdly and sometimes terrifyingly unreal. The two or three Oxford friends I had kept up a spasmodic