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‘I’m just not pretty enough when I’m undressed.’
    â€˜You are talking real nonsense. You don’t know what nonsense you are talking.’
    â€˜Oh no, I’m not. You see – it started all right, but then he touched me’ – she put her hands on her breasts – ‘and it all went wrong. I always knew they weren’t much good. At school we used to have dormitory inspection – it was awful. Everybody could grow them big except me. I’m no Jayne Mansfield, I can tell you.’ She gave again that mirthless giggle. ‘I remember one of the girls told me to sleep with a pillow on top – they said they’d struggle for release and what they needed was exercise. But of course it didn’t work. I doubt if the idea was very scientific.’ She added, ‘I remember it was awfully hot at night like that.’
    â€˜Peter doesn’t strike me,’ I said cautiously, ‘as a man who would want a Jayne Mansfield.’
    â€˜But you understand, don’t you, that, if he finds me ugly, it’s all so hopeless.’
    I wanted to agree with her – perhaps this reason which she had thought up would be less distressing than the truth, and soon enough there would be someone to cure her distrust. I had noticed before that it is often the lovely women who have the least confidence in their looks, but all the same I couldn’t pretend to her that I understood it her way. I said, ‘You must trust me. There’s nothing at all wrong with you and that’s why I’m talking to you the way I am.’
    â€˜You are very sweet,’ she said, and her eyes passed over me rather as the beam from the lighthouse which at night went past the Musée Grimaldi and after a certain time returned and brushed all our windows indifferently on the hotel front. She continued, ‘He said they’d be back by cocktail-time.’
    â€˜If you want a rest first’ – for a little time we had been close, but now again we were getting further and further away. If I pressed her now she might in the end be happy – does conventional morality demand that a girl remains tied as she was tied? They’d been married in church; she was probably a good Christian, and I knew the ecclesiastical rules: at this moment of her life she could be free of him, the marriage could be annulled, but in a day or two it was only too probable that the same rules would say, ‘He’s managed well enough, you are married for life.’
    And yet I couldn’t press her. Wasn’t I after all assuming far too much? Perhaps it was only a question of first-night nerves; perhaps in a little while the three of them would be back, silent, embarrassed, and Tony in his turn would have a contusion on his cheek. I would have been very glad to see it there; egotism fades a little with the passions which engender it, and I would have been content, I think, just to see her happy.
    So we returned to the hotel, not saying much, and she went to her room and I to mine. It was in the end a comedy and not a tragedy, a farce even, which is why I have given this scrap of reminiscence a farcical title.
    7
    I was woken from my middle-aged siesta by the telephone. For a moment, surprised by the darkness, I couldn’t find the light-switch. Scrambling for it, I knocked over my bedside lamp – the telephone went on ringing, and I tried to pick up the holder and knocked over a tooth-glass in which I had given myself a whisky. The little illuminated dial of my watch gleamed up at me marking 8.30. The telephone continued to ring. I got the receiver off, but this time it was the ashtray which fell over. I couldn’t get the cord to extend up to my ear, so I shouted in the direction of the telephone, ‘Hullo!’
    A tiny sound came up from the floor which I interpreted as ‘Is that William?’
    I shouted, ‘Hold on,’ and now that I was properly awake I