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obliged to accompany a friend along Wigmore Street I found myself trembling with fearful expectation. But it is easy to avoid people in London, and I managed it well enough. The geography of the locality took on, however, a fearful moral significance: it became a map of my weaknesses and my strengths, a landscape full of petty sloughs and pitfalls, like the one which Bunyan traversed. I avoided each place where we had ever met, and each place which I had even heard him mention: one day I found myself pretending that I was obliged to go and buy a certain article from Peter Robinson's on Oxford Circus, and I only just caught myself out in time. I stuck to it and, of course, as the week lengthened into a fortnight, and the fortnight into a month, it became increasingly impossible to change my line of retreat.
    It took me some time to realize that I was pregnant: the possibility had of course crossed my mind fairly early on, but I had dismissed it as being too ridiculous and unlikely a symptom of my sense of doom to be worth serious attention. When I was finally obliged to acknowledge my condition, I was for the first time in my life completely at a loss. I remember the moment quite well: I was sitting at my usual desk in the British Museum looking up something on Sir Walter Raleigh, when out of the blue came this sudden suspicion, which hardened instantly as ever into a certainty. I got out my diary and started feverishly checking on dates, which was difficult as I never make a note of
anything, let alone of trivial things like the workings of my guts. In the end, however, after much hard memory work, I sorted it out and convinced myself that it must be so. I sat there, and I could see my hand trembling on the desk. And for the first time the prospect before me seemed so appalling that even I, doom-suspecting and creating as I have always been, could not look at it. It was an unfamiliar sensation, the blankness that occupied my mind instead of the usual profuse images of disaster. I remained in this state for some five minutes before, wearily, I set my imagination to work. What it produced for me was very nasty. Gin, psychiatrists, hospitals, accidents, village maidens drowned in duck ponds, tears, pain, humiliations. Nothing, at that stage, resembling a baby. These shocking forebodings occupied me for half an hour or more, and I began to think that I would have to get up and go, or to go out and have a cup of coffee or something. But it was an hour before my usual time for departure, and I could not do it. I so often wanted not to do my full three hours, and had so often resisted the lure of company or distraction in order to complete them, that now I felt myself compelled to sit there, staring at the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, in a mockery of attention. Except that after some time I found myself really attending: my mind, bent from its true obsession with what seemed at first intolerable strain, began to revert almost of its own accord to its more accustomed preoccupations, and by the end of the morning I had covered exactly as much ground as I had planned. It gave me much satisfaction, this fact. Much self-satisfaction. And as I walked down the road to meet Lydia for lunch, I discovered another source of satisfaction: now, at least, I would be compelled to see George. I had an excuse, now, for seeing him.
    Later that afternoon I realized that I was going to see George now less than ever. It took some time for the full
complexity of the situation to sink in. When I realized the implications of my deceit, it became apparent that I was going to have to keep the whole thing to myself. I could not face the prospect of speculation, anyone's speculation. So I decided to get on with it by myself as best I could. I have already recounted my ludicrous attempt with the gin: after this I got in touch with a Cambridge friend of mine who had had an abortion, and asked for the address and details, which I obtained. I rang the number