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closed the diary and shut the window against the moths. Later, when she was in bed she tried to return to the wood where Vesey had kissed her, but doubt and disappointment overtook her again. She could not believe that caution and uncertainty could have so wickedly crippled her happiness at such a time. She longed for a second chance, to have the moment at her disposal again. The story began to be how she imagined having behaved. But the recollection of that walk back in single file through the trees, shuffling in the dead leaves, stiff, self-conscious, hinted that they had reached some stubbornness in one another, that they had broken the past in such a way that nothing could repair it. In despair she lay awake wondering about the morrow. With one of her few flashes of perception she imagined Vesey peacefully asleep.
    Another day is another world. The difference between foreign countries is never so great as the difference between night and day. Not only are the landscape and the light changed, but people are different, relationships which the night before had progressed at a sudden pace, appear to be back where they were. Some hopes are renewed, but others dwindle: the state of the world looks rosier and death further off; but the state of ourselves and our loves and ambitions seems more prosaic. We begin to regret promises, as if the influence of darkness were like the influence of drink. We do not love our friends so warmly: or ourselves. Children feel less need of their parents: writers tear up the masterpiece they wrote the night before.
    So Harriet met Vesey bravely in a more sober world. While she was propping her bicycle against the wall of the house, he called to her from an upstairs window. She waved with what she thought was a beautiful negligence and disappeared into the house.
    Because he realised how Harriet tumbled the same thoughts about and about in her head, Vesey had regretted his experiment of the evening before. He had lost no sleep over it, though. He could not make a fuss in his mind about such triviality. He had his life before him, he assured himself. ‘After all,’ he thought this morning, watching himself in a mirror as he combed his hair, ‘we are children: no more.’ He did not know that at his age most youths believe that they are men.
    The streak of cruelty which Lilian had perceived in him was real enough, but used defensively. He would not have wished to be cruel to Harriet, who had not threatened him. Indeed it had begun to seem to him that only she was set against the great weight of disapproval he felt upon him. His mother treated him, at best, with an amused kindliness. Among her friends she drew attention to him as if he were a beloved marmoset on a chain, somehow enhancing her own originality, decorating her. After her day’s work, while she bathed, he brought her drinks, carried messages to and from the telephone. In later years, the word ‘mother’ brought to his mind the steamy bathroom, the picture of her creamy-yellow body with its almost navy-blue hair, the hands and feet with their darkly varnished nails. This was his only time alone with her. As soon as she was dressed, she belonged to other people. He was the quaint little monkey handing round olives and cigarettes, sipping gin to amuse them. His father always went straight to his study when he arrived home. His appearance in the drawing-room was a signal for his wife’s friends to scatter. With his own especial remote geniality, he would drink his one sherry and speed them all on their way: large and formidable, he underlined their flimsiness, and ‘Poor Barbara!’ they would laugh, bundling into their little cars, sitting on one another’s knees. ‘What a bloody old bore he is!’ In search of a gayer host, they would drive away.
    When Vesey went to school, he realised at once that this background was better not mentioned, but he felt – for he was quick to