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brain throb.
    Again they curtailed their holiday, to return to the comfortable old flat in London.
    On the first morning after their return, she said: “George, you know you’re getting too old for this sort of thing—it’s not good for you; you look ghastly.”
    “But, darling, why? What else am I still alive for?”
    “People’ll say I’m killing you,” she said, with a sharp, half-angry, half-amused, black glance.
    “But, my darling, believe me …”
    He could see them both in the mirror; he, an old pursy man, head lowered in sullen obstinacy; she … but he could not read her face.
    “And perhaps I’m getting too old?” she remarked suddenly.
    For a few days she was gay, mocking, then suddenly tender. She was provocative, teasing him with her eyes; then she would deliberately yawn and say, “I’m going to sleep. Goodnight George.”
    “Well of course, my darling, if you’re tired.”
    One morning she announced she was going to have a birthday party; it would be her fortieth birthday soon. The way she said it made George feel uneasy.
    On the morning of her birthday she came into his study where he had been sleeping, carrying his breakfast tray. He raised himself on his elbow and gazed at her, appalled. For a moment he had imagined it must be another woman. She had put on a severe navy blue suit, cut like a man’s; heavy black-laced shoes; and she had taken the wisps of black hair back off her face and pinned them into a sort of clumsy knot. She was suddenly a middleaged woman.
    “But, my darling,” he said, “my darling, what have you done to yourself?”
    “I’m forty,” she said. “Time to grow up.”
    “But, my darling, I do so love you in your nice clothes. I do so love you being beautiful in your lovely clothes.”
    She laughed, and left the breakfast tray beside his bed, and went clumping out on her heavy shoes.
    That morning she stood in the kitchen beside a very large cake, on which she was carefully placing forty small pink candles. But it seemed only the sister had been asked to the party, for that afternoon the three of them sat around the cake and looked at one another. George looked at Rosa, the sister, in her ugly, straight, thick suit, and at his darling Bobby, all her grace and charm submerged into heavy tweed, her hair dragged back, without makeup. They were two middleaged women, talking about food and buying.
    George said nothing. His whole body throbbed with loss.
    The dreadful Rosa was looking with her sharp eyes around the expensive flat, and then at George and then at her sister.
    “You’ve let yourself go, haven’t you, Bobby?” she commented at last. She sounded pleased about it.
    Bobby glanced defiantly at George. “I haven’t got time for all this nonsense any more,” she said. “I simply haven’t got time. We’re all getting on now, aren’t we?”
    George saw the two women looking at him. He thought they had the same black, hard, inquisitive stare over sharp-bladed noses. He could not speak. His tongue was thick. The blood was beating through his body. His heart seemed to be swelling and filling his whole body, an enormous soft growth of pain. He could not hear for the tolling of the blood through his ears. The blood was beating up into his eyes, but he shut them so as not to see the two women.

The Woman

    T he two elderly gentlemen emerged onto the hotel terrace at the same moment. They stopped, and checked movements that suggested they wished to retreat. Their first involuntary glances had been startled, even troubled. Now they allowed their eyes to exchange a long, formal glare of hate, before turning deliberately away from each other.
    They surveyed the terrace. A problem! Only one of the tables still remained in sunlight. They stiffly marched towards it, pulled out chairs, seated themselves. At once they opened newspapers and lifted them up like screens.
    A pretty waitress came sauntering across to take the orders. The two newspapers remained stationary.