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as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work. When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn’t settle to work: I would reconstruct what we had said to each other: I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make-believe that love lasted, I was happy - I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
    And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but now there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel - the end of love. That was being worked out now, like a story: the pointed word that set her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.
    I don’t wonder that she hadn’t liked my last book. It was written all the time against the grain, without help, for no reason but that one had to go on living. The reviewers said it was the work of a craftsman: that was all that was left me of what had been a passion. I thought perhaps with the next novel the passion would return, the excitement would wake again of remembering what one had never consciously known, but for a week after lunching with Sarah at Rules I could do no work at all. There it goes again - the I, I, I, as though this were my story, and not the story of Sarah, Henry, and of course, that third, whom I hated without yet knowing him, or even believing in him.
    I had tried to work in the morning and failed: I drank too much with my lunch so the afternoon was wasted: after dark I stood at the window with the lights turned off and could see across the flat dark Common the lit windows of the north side. It was very cold and my gas fire only warmed me if I huddled close, and then it scorched. A few flakes of snow drifted across the lamps of the south side and touched the pane with thick damp fingers. I didn’t hear the bell ring. My landlady knocked on the door and said, ‘A Mr Parkis to see you,’ thus indicating by a grammatical article the social status of my caller. I had never heard the name, but I told her to show him in.
    I wondered where I had seen before those gentle apologetic eyes, that long outdated moustache damp with the climate? I had only turned on my reading lamp and he came towards it, peering short-sightedly; he couldn’t make me out in the shadows. He said, ‘Mr Bendrix, sir?’
    ‘Yes.’
    He said, ‘The name’s Parkis,’ as though that might mean something to me. He added, ‘Mr Savage’s man, sir.’
    ‘Oh yes. Sit down. Have a cigarette.’
    ‘Oh no, sir,’ he said, ‘not on duty - except of course, for purposes of concealment.’
    ‘But you aren’t on duty now?’
    ‘In a manner, sir, yes. I’ve just been relieved, sir, for half an hour while I make my report. Mr Savage said as how you’d like it weekly - with expenses.’
    ‘There is something to report?’ I wasn’t sure whether it was disappointment I felt or excitement.
    ‘It’s not quite a blank sheet, sir,’ he remarked complacently, and took an extraordinary number of papers and envelopes