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her endeavours, largely a matter of aspiration. There was no possibility of my sharing my thoughts with Betsy, although I should have liked to discuss my situation with another woman, a woman essentially uncorrupted, who might not understand but whose sympathy would be guaranteed by that very transparency which would honour my confession (for confession it would be), with all the natural simplicity she had managed to retain. She would no doubt do her best to dignify it with the appropriate classical quotation, out of loyalty, out of a desire to reconnect with matters so evidently absent from my own preoccupations. Or would my preoccupations more properly be identified as obsessions? My own nature must have held dark secrets, which were dark only because they were not shared. In the course of those evenings with Edmund all conscience dissolved and I possessed a conviction that I was acting in accordance with my true nature. In the intervals I was conscious of a fall from grace which I was obliged to register, though to condemn it seemed not to be within my power.
    In the kitchen the air vibrated as if the phone had just stopped ringing. I had missed his call, and it was Thursday; on Friday he would join his family in the country and I should not see him until the following week. I dreaded the weekends, which were filled with subterfuges of the kind designed to uphold my stance as a loyal wife. I should be deprived of my afternoons in the garden, watching the children until they went home for their tea, waiting — and this was the only circumstance in which waiting could be counted a pleasure — for the time when I would slip my key in the door and will my waiting to end. The arrangement no longer seemed questionable to me, nor did the fact that Edmund had designed it, initially, for others, for anyone who might willingly join him there, become a partner in the kind of deception I had embraced. I had a moment of fear: was he therefore entirely cynical in his approach to me? This I dismissed: I had met his glance and sustained it, besides which there could be no other truth. Before I knew him I would no doubt have expressed disapproval of a man who kept such an establishment. Now in an odd way I approved of it as an indication of a man's sexual entrepreneurship. And the benefit was all mine. Nevertheless I was obliged to recognize the changes it had brought about in my own nature. For instance I no longer dreamed. My dream life, which had been vivid, had been cancelled by the vividness of events. If I dreamed at all it was in the daytime, sitting in that garden. Nor did I read as much as formerly, though my mind was still obstinately stuffed with Victorian prototypes. This had been kindly looked upon by my husband as a harmless quirk which did me credit. My attempts to introduce such subjects as I thought interesting at our dinner parties must have made me seem awkward, tiresome. I blushed now in retrospect at what must have been tolerance on the part of our guests.
    I surveyed the flat, which had been Digby's flat, and therefore part of my mother's plan for my future when our house in Bourne Street was put on the market. Despite her worldly opinions she was as unreconstructed as Mrs Crook, believing that a woman's principal need was to be looked after by a man. I accepted the dull flat for what it was, a no doubt enviable property to which, in some unimaginable future, I should not lay claim. At that time, and that could only be when Digby died, I should leave and go somewhere else, perhaps back to Paris, where my former morose habits would reassert themselves. This prospect no longer frightened me. I had been given a certificate of viability, and it would guarantee my future. I knew that, in comparison with Edmund, I had few assets of my own. This was the one factor that seriously divided us. Sometimes I felt poor when I was with him, and this was a genuine shadow on my happiness. I doubted whether this aspect of the affair