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had left me £200 in his will and Giles seemed to think he could manage the children. I don’t think I ever loved anyone in the way I loved Giles — except maybe a boy once, when I was very young.”
    â€œThen …”
    â€œWhy? I don’t know.”
    â€œWas it something to do with the children?”
    â€œI don’t know. I can’t remember.”
    â€œDid you insist on having children — which he didn’t want?”
    â€œNo! He loved children!”
    â€œWhy did it go wrong, then? What happened?”
    â€œNothing happened! I’ve told you, that was the thing about that time — nothing happened!”
    â€œAnd yet after four years you were ready to leave … Giles and marry Jake. Something must have happened.”
    â€œI just had to go on, that’s all! When I stopped wanting …”
    â€œWanting?”
    â€œTo go to bed with him. Then there was nothing. No future. Nothing to look …”
    â€œBut why did you stop wanting to go to bed with him? Because he didn’t want any more children, and sex without children was unthinkable to you, a kind of obscenity? As it is with Jake, now? Isn’t that true?”
    â€œNo! It’s not true!”
    â€œDon’t you think sex without children is a bit messy, Mrs. Armitage? Come now. You’re an intelligent woman. Be honest. Don’t you think that the people you most fear are disgusting to you, and hateful, because they are doing something for its own sake, for the mere pleasure of it? Something which you must sanctify, as it were, by incessant reproduction? Could it be that in spite of what might be called a very full life, it’s sex you really hate? Sex itself you are frightened of? What do you think?”
    â€œYou really should have been an Inquisitor,” I said. “Do I burn now, or later?”
    He laughed heartily. “I’m glad to see your sense of humour flourishing.” Everything about his face, except the jovial mouth, was as cold as mine. “Now, I was going to give you a prescription, wasn’t I?” The pen flourished again. “One twice a day … There you are. I think they’ll deal with those little weeps of yours. But keep them away from the children.”
    â€œYes,” I said. “Thank you, doctor.”
    â€œAnd don’t be down-hearted. Great progress is being made. Great, great progress.”

9
    Although he has no use for Freud (“all that cock”), Jake would unhesitatingly say that I longed all my life for a husband like my father: practical, positive, a man with a work bench, reliable. But then, my father was not like this. His reliability was invented by Jake. My father was a complete provincial. His ideas sprang directly from his own actions, and his actions were necessary to the way he lived. Nothing from the outside ever touched him. He had to engage a woman — my mother — to cook for him, but beyond this he was as near self-supporting as it is possible for a twentieth century Englishman to be. Among his few failures was an attempt to grow his own tobacco.
    My grandfather died when my father was twenty, leaving him the family business, a small tent and rope factory in Bedfordshire. The factory made many things besides rope and tents: string, matting, canvas, anything that could be made out of hemp. This hemp was grown on a plantation in India, managed in my childhood by one of my father’s cousins, a tall, remote man whom we called Uncle Ted. If I had an ideal, Uncle Ted approached it far more than my father. He was lean and burnt out, with colourless eyes like diamonds and enormous feet. I always liked men with big feet, but never married one. Jake’s are small, arched, short-toed, inclined to be dainty. When I first met him I thought he was queer, because of the size of his feet and the crumpled little suede shoes he wore on them.
    Uncle Ted, my first love, was almost completely