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him. I was horrible to Hester, Mummy. But she gave me too much to bear.’

A silence fell. Under the sound of her son’s deep breaths Monica heard laughter in the kitchen and the robin’s song in the garden. A tradesman’s cart drove up and stopped at the back door. She glanced at her wrist. It was half-past eleven. Clive’s eyes were closed. He was shut into his dark world of shame and passion. He had never till now inhabited such a world and strange it was to know that she accepted his initiation. His flame had been too white. It had burned down now into a hidden core of consciousness and she seemed to see the smoke and fire that tainted its limpidity.

‘Clive,’ she said, and as he heard her voice he opened his eyes and looked at her, ‘would you have found it easier if it had been a man you could have understood her loving?’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked after a moment. They were, again, sounding each other.

‘Would it have been easier for you to accept, if Hester’s lover had been somebody you could understand her loving?’

‘Why should you ask me that? You mean that I deceive myself; that I don’t know myself; that I was as primitive as anyone and would have writhed,