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I’d had too much wine cup.”
    “Not at all. You actually helped me at one moment.”
    “What moment?”
    “When I was trying to get off——”
    “I don’t want to know,” she said, quickly.
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Helen.”
    “Let’s talk about something quite different.”
    Which they did. But a few weeks later Harold had, through sheer persistence, won back all the lost ground and made a few new bridgeheads. And about a month after that he actually got her to go to bed with him. This wasn’t really as interesting as had seemed likely, but then the first time was never too good, it was the follow-up that was most rewarding. But somehow it wasn’t. Although Helen was really rather a nice girl, in a coy way, and had a neat way of dressing and a satisfyingly shaped body, her mind never stopped listening for door-bells or Mrs Fanshaw’s footsteps above, and it was quite obvious that her heart was only in it through a sense of duty. She was, after all, twenty-five, and beginning to worry about the future. The combination of fear and calculation which Harold detected in even her warmest embraceirritated him profoundly. After a time he realized that he didn’t even like her very much. It was much easier to have Helen around than to go out and find someone else, she was quite affectionate and reasonably acquiescent, but the only reason he continued seeing and sleeping with her was that he felt rather guilty about having started the thing in the first place, and was bone idle and probably undersexed. All of which depressed him, but somehow the affair kept going, and they even spent a week together with his parents, who found her very nice, darling, but one should look around when one was young, shouldn’t one? Her parents luckily lived conveniently far from London, so he could avoid meeting them. He felt that to be introduced to them might be fatal. Helen was always referring to them in what she imagined was a subtle way, telling him how her sister had already got a son and was expecting another baby soon and how much her parents liked being grandparents (something Harold refused point-blank to believe) and how her father was really quite well off, and what nice things her sister had got as wedding-presents, and how beautiful the wedding had been, and how much her father and mother liked their son-in-law , till Harold told her briefly and pointedly that he wasn’t considering marriage for several years, “until he was well established with the firm”. He had quite a good story worked out about how the firm preferred people to wait till they were partners before they married, and he even went so far as to invent an imaginary man called George Calcott who had had a very promising career ruined by marrying against the advice of Mr Hansett. Poor fellow, he had never been made a partner, and was going to shoot himself in despair next time Helen brought the subject up.
    As he worked at the graph Harold added a few details to George Calcott’s married life which he had already made pretty unhappy. The Calcotts seemed never to have heard about contraceptives, for one thing. They lived in a miserableflat in Fulham and the smell of babies was simply overpowering . There were four children already, and another on the way, and all were sickly in one way or another, and the cost of preventing them dying was beginning to sap George’s own health. The National Health Service helped, of course, but there were all sorts of things necessary for sick babies for which doctors simply wouldn’t give prescriptions. Jennifer Calcott was a nice girl, too, which made it all so sad, and a couple of years ago, she had been distinctly pretty. But now she never seemed to find the time to wash her hair, even, and what with the number of nappies drying in the kitchen there never seemed to be room for her own and George’s dirty clothes, which were gradually blocking the back door. A man had already been round twice from the local Health