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instance, you’re always so critical of the way people dress, you never think them smart enough, whereas he is always got up like a scarecrow, he wears ties that my hotel waiter wouldn’t look at — but you don’t mind.’
    But Boris was not to be roused: ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he explained, ‘if a man is badly dressed when he doesn’t bother about his clothes at all. What is rotten is to try to make a splash, and not pull it off.’
    ‘Well, you don’t do that, my little tyke.’
    ‘I know what suits me,’ said Boris modestly. He reflected that he was wearing a blue-ribbed sweater, and was glad: it was a handsome sweater. Lola had taken his hand and was tossing it up and down between her own. Boris watched his hand rise and fall, and he thought: ‘It doesn’t belong to me, it’s a sort of pancake.’ It had in fact grown numb: this amused him, and he twitched a finger to bring it back to life. The finger touched the palm of Lola’s hand, and Lola flung him a grateful look. ‘That’s what makes me nervous,’ thought Boris irritably. He told himself that he would certainly have found it easier to show affection if Lola hadn’t fallen so often into these appealing, melting moods. He didn’t in the least mind letting his hands be played with in public by an ageing woman. He had long thought that this was rather in his line: even when he was alone, in the metro, people looked at him rather quizzically, and the little shop girls on their way home laughed in his face.
    ‘You still haven’t told me why you think him such a fine fellow.’
    She was like that, she could never stop once she had begun. Boris was sure that she was hurting her own feelings, but she enjoyed that. He looked at her: the air around her was blue, and her face was whitish blue. But the eyes were feverish and hard. ‘Why? — tell me.’
    ‘Because he is a fine fellow,’ groaned Boris. ‘Oh, dear, how you do pester me. He doesn’t care about anything.’
    ‘Well, does that make a fine fellow? You don’t care about anything, do you?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘But you do care a little about me, don’t you?’
    ‘Yes, I care about you.’
    Lola looked unhappy, and Boris turned his head away. Anyhow, he didn’t much like looking at Lola when she put on that expression. She was upset: he thought it silly of her, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He did everything expected of him. He was faithful to Lola, he telephoned to her often, he went to call for her three times a week when she came out of the Sumatra, and on those evenings he slept in her flat. For the rest, it was a question of character, probably. A question of age, too — older people grow embittered, and behave as though their lives were at stake. Once, when Boris was a little boy, he had dropped his spoon: on being told to pick it up, he had refused, and flown into a passion. Then his father had said, in an unforgettably majestic tone: ‘Very well, then, I will pick it up.’ Boris had seen a tall body stiffly bending down, and a bald cranium, he heard sundry creaking sounds — the whole thing was an intolerable sacrilege, and he burst out sobbing. Since then Boris had regarded grown-ups as bulky and impotent divinities. If they bent down, they looked as though they were going to break: if they slipped and fell, the effect they produced in the onlooker was a desire to laugh and a sense of awe-stricken abhorrence. And if the tears came into their eyes, as into Lola’s at that moment, one was simply at a loss. Grown-up people’s tears were a mystical catastrophe, the sort of tears God sheds over the wickedness of mankind. From another point of view, of course, he respected Lola for being so passionate. Mathieu had explained to him that a human being ought to have passions, and Descartes had said so too.
    ‘Delarue has his passions,’ he said, pursuing his reflections aloud: ‘but that doesn’t prevent him caring for nothing. He is free.’
    ‘By that token I’m free