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comment. It blinds you to what really happened. To think of him in this house, possessing the rooms, eating, sleeping—you forget he lived once, he was real. I wonder which room—?”
    “You don’t have to harp on it,” Alma said. “You sound like Peter.”
    “Poor Peter, you are attacking him today. He’ll be here to protect you tonight, after all.”
    “He won’t, because we’ve parted.”
    “You could have stopped me talking about him, then. But how for God’s sake did it happen?”
    “Oh, on Friday. I don’t want to talk about it.” Walking hand in hand to the front door and as always kissing as Peter turned the key; her father waiting in the hall: “Now listen, Peter, this can’t go on”—prompted by her mother, Alma knew, her father was too weak to act independently. She’d pulled Peter into the kitchen—“Go, darling, I’ll try and calm them down,” she’d said desperately—but her mother was waiting, immediately animated, like a fairground puppet by a penny: “You know you’ve broken my heart, Alma, marrying beneath you.” Alma had slumped into a chair, but Peter leaned against the dresser, facing them all, her mother’s prepared speech: “Peter, I will not have you marrying Alma—you’re uneducated, you’ll get nowhere at the library, you’re obsessed with politics and you don’t care how much they distress Alma—” and on and on. If only he’d come to her instead of standing pugnaciously apart! She’d looked up at him finally, tearful, and he’d said “Well, darling, I’ll answer any point of your mother’s you feel is not already answered”—and suddenly everything had been too much; she’d run sobbing to her room. Below, the back door had closed. She’d wrenched open the window; Peter was crossing the garden beneath the rain. “Peter!” she’d cried out. “Whatever happens I still love you—” but her mother was before her, pushing her away from the window, shouting down “Go back to your kennel!” … “What?” she asked Maureen, distracted back.
    “I said I don’t believe it was your decision. It must have been your mother.”
    “That’s irrelevant. I broke it off finally.” Her letter: “It would be impossible to continue when my parents refuse to receive you but anyway I don’t want to any more, I want to study hard and become a musician”—she’d posted it on Saturday after a sleepless sobbing night, and immediately she’d felt released, at peace. Then the thought disturbed her: it must have reached Peter by now; surely he wouldn’t try to see her? But he wouldn’t be able to get in; she was safe.
    “You can’t tell me you love your mother more than Peter. You’re simply taking refuge again.”
    “Surely you don’t think I love her now. But I still feel I must be loyal. Is there a difference between love and loyalty?”
    “Never having had either, I wouldn’t know. Good God, Alma, stop barricading yourself with pseudo-philosophy!”
    “If you must know, Maureen, I shall be leaving them as soon as I’ve paid for my flute. They gave it to me for my twenty-first and now they’re threatening to take it back. It’ll take me two years, but I shall pay.”
    “And you’ll be twenty-five. God Almighty, why? Bowing down to private ownership?”
    “You wouldn’t understand any more than Peter would.”
    “You’ve returned the ring, of course.”
    “No.” Alma shifted Victimes de Devoir . “Once I asked Peter if I could keep it if we broke up.” Two weeks before their separation; she’d felt the pressures—her parents’ crush, his horrors—misshaping her, callous as thumbs on plasticine. And he’d replied that there’d be no question of their breaking up, which she’d taken for assent.
    “And Peter’s feelings?” Maureen let the question resonate, but it was muffled by the music.
    “Maureen, I just want to remember the happy times!”
    “I don’t understand that remark. At least, perhaps I do, but I don’t like