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terrible temper!’ ‘But why? Why do you think so?’ ‘Why? Well, of course, all that control, everything so neat and clean, he must burst out somewhere.’ And, once, ‘If he has a mistress …’ - the use of the old-fashioned word was deliberate, part of the act - ‘then she would have to be someone with a bad reputation, someone rather awful, or he would have to think she was, or other people would have to think so even if he didn’t. Because he would have to feel wicked, don’t you see?’ Well, of course she was right.
    I found myself making excuses to sit there, to hear what she would come out with. But I was reluctant too, watching the knife being slipped in so neatly, so precisely, and again and again.
    Of Janet White, a girl of about her age: ‘She’ll spend her life looking for someone like Daddy, but where will she find him. I mean now , he won’t exist.’ She meant, of course, the general break-up of things, times which were not conducive to the production of professors with very clean white shirts and a secret passion for the unrespectable - since respectability itself was sentenced to death, and with it the distinctions his secret needs must feed on. The professor she called The White Rabbit. His daughter she called Daddy’s Girl, making the point that in doing so she was of course describing herself: ‘What else, after all?’ When I suggested that she might enjoy making a friend of Janet, she said: ‘What, me and her?’
    There she sat, most of the day, lolling in a large chair that she pulled up for the purpose: a child, presenting herself as one. One could almost see the white socks on her plump, well-turned legs, the bow in her hair. But what one really did see was different. She wore jeans and a shirt she had ironed that morning whose top two buttons were undone. Her hair was now parted in the middle, and at a stroke she was turned into a young beauty: yes, already, there she was.
    And, as if in acknowledgement of this step forward into vulnerability, now her worst, or best, comments were for the boys who went past: this one’s way of walking which she knew represented an uncertainty about himself; that one’s flashy way of dressing; the other one’s bad skin, or unkempt hair. These unattractive grubs represented a force, an imperative which there was no way of evading, and like a girl on a too-high swing she was shrieking in thrilled terror.
    She was dreadful in.her accuracy. She depressed me - oh, for many reasons; my own past being one of them. Yet she did not suspect this, she really did believe - so the bright manner, her confident glances at me said - that she was, as usual, ‘paying her way’; and this time by her perspicacity. She simply could not let anyone pass without swallowing them, and regurgitating them covered in her slime: the clever child, the one who could not be deceived, who could not have anything put over on her: who had been applauded for being like this, had been taught it.
    And yet I came into the room once and saw her talking through the window with Janet White: she was earnest, warm, apparently sincere. If she did not like Janet White, she intended Janet White to like her. Infinite promises were made by both girls on the lines of joint forays into the markets, visits, a walk. And when Janet went off, smiling because of the warmth she had absorbed from Emily, Emily said: ‘She’s heard her parents talking about me, and now she’ll report back.’ True enough, of course.
    The point was that there wasn’t anybody who came near her, into her line of sight, who was not experienced by her as a threat. This was how her experience, whatever that had been, had ‘set’ her. I found I was trying to put myself in her place, tried to be her, to understand how it was that people must pass and re-pass sharply outlined by her need to criticize - to defend; and found I was thinking that this was only what everyone did, what I did, but there was something in her which