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though it had been rejected eight times, returning to roost in my own stamped and addressed envelope among my punctual morning letters, over a period of a year. It was perhaps because of its outcast fate that I felt an attachment to it. The old lady’s hands clutched her chinchilla with her long red fingernails dug into the silver-grey pelt. The poem was entitled Metamorphosis.
     
This is the pain that sea anemones bear
in the fear of aberration but wilfully
aspiring to respire in another,
more difficult way, and turning
flower into animal interminably.

    As I was reading this first verse my boy-friend Leslie let himself in the door with the spare keys I had given him. He was tall and stoopy with a lock of blond hair falling over one eye and a fresh young face. I was proud of him.
    ‘How are you?’ said Edwina when I introduced him. She had told me that since she was forgetful of names and faces she always greeted people with ‘How are you?’ in case she had met them before.
    ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ said Leslie without returning the question. Very often he irritated me in the extreme by small wants of courtesy. He was very much absorbed with numerous private anxieties which he was too self-centred tot overcome now, when I was presenting him with this splendid apparition, Edwina, an ancient, wrinkled, painted spirit wrapped in luxurious furs.
    Edwina enquired kindly, as he took off his coat and sat on the divan bed, ‘What is your profession, Sir?‘
    ‘I’m a critic,’ said Leslie.
    I was suddenly disenchanted with Leslie. It was a feeling that came over me ever more frequently, leading to quarrels in the end. Leslie just sat there and let himself be interviewed, unable to forget himself and his own concerns, with his young face and good health contrasting with Edwina’s dotty shrewdness, her scarlet nails, her bright avid eyes. I saw in the pocket of Leslie’s coat the top of a bottle which he had evidently brought along for the two of us. I pulled it out; smuggled Algerian wine.
    ‘You’re a music critic?’ Edwina asked Leslie.
    ‘No, a literary critic.’ He turned to me, ‘As a matter of fact, that poem you were reading—what was that line, “aspiring and respiring”…?’
    I put down the bottle and took up my poem.
    ‘They think I’ve got a screw loose,’ said Edwina. ‘But I haven’t got a screw loose. Ha!’
    ‘A very bad line,’ said Leslie.
    I read it out: ‘Aspiring to respire in another… ‘It seemed to me Leslie was right but I said, ‘What’s wrong with it?’
    ‘Is that a bottle of something?’ Edwina said.
    Leslie said, ‘Too feeble. Bad-sounding.’
    I said, ‘Edwina, it’s Algerian wine. I would love you to have some but I think it would be bad for you.‘
    ‘Let me open it,’ said Leslie, finding the corkscrew in a proprietory way. He was ambivalent about my writings, in that he often liked what I wrote but disliked my thoughts of being a published writer. This caused me to reject most of his criticism. As for his being a literary critic, that was not an untrue claim for he reviewed books for a periodical called Time and Tide and for other little reviews, although for his daily job he was a lawyer’s clerk.
    Leslie uncorked the bottle while Edwina assured him she was equal to a sip of Algerian wine.
    There was a knock on my door. It was the irate house-boys with Mr Alexander, my landlord, at his back.
    ‘Someone is ringing up on Mr Alexander’s private number, ‘tis a great inconvenience,’ said the boys. Mr Alexander himself said, ‘The house phone’s out of order. I can let you take this call in our sitting-room as your friend says it’s urgent. But please tell your friends not to intrude further.’ He went on like this as I followed him to his sitting-room where his wife with her bubble-cut black hair sat stretching her long legs.
    It was Sir Quentin on the phone. ‘Mummy is not here,’ he said, ‘We—’
    ‘She’s here with me. I’ll bring her