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don’t care for the word.’
    ‘Did you go out with anyone?’
    ‘I don’t like that phrase much either.’
    ‘Fine,’ I said, cheerily refusing to be diverted. ‘How about lovers? Are you happy with that term?’
    She touched the leather bag she always had beside her in the chair and said, vaguely, ‘Oh, you know, I never really expected anyone to want me.’
    I pictured her, as she might have looked then, underweight, unfashionably dressed, a pale young woman. When I met her she still gave an impression of pallor and plainness, though no one looks their best in the aftermath of a suicide attempt and it was a while before I saw Elizabeth Cruikshank smile. When she did I was reminded of an expression of my mother’s: ‘It was as if the moon had taken off her clothes and gone dancing.’
    ‘But you married?’
    ‘I married,’ she assented. She gave an impression that if she could she would have denied it.
    To augment her library studies, she explained, she enrolled on an art history course, which in those days was run at the old North London Poly. She met her future husband in the polytechnic canteen where she was in the habit of going for a supper before the evening lectures. She’d queued up for her usual soup and bread roll, being economical with her rations, and, searching in her bag for her purse, accidentally tipped the tray so that the plate slid, spilling soup over the man before her in the queue.
    ‘He was nice about it, though it ruined his jacket. It was light-coloured and the soup was tomato and I was mortified.But he laughed and when I asked how I could make it up to him he said I could come to the pub. So I went. He seemed to like me.’ She sounded apologetic.
    ‘And you liked that?’
    ‘I liked being the centre of someone’s attention.’
    Up till now, she’d barely held my glance, her eyes always flickering off to the quince tree, or to some point in her imagination projected on to the glass. But now she looked at me with a fierce directness that almost made me smile.
    ‘Not everyone wants attention,’ I said, and regretted it because she took it as criticism, which I should have foreseen.
    ‘Yes, wishing to die is seen as attention-seeking, I know.’ Her voice was low and she hardly raised it but at moments of tension I noticed that her diction became precise.
    ‘I didn’t mean that,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
    It bothers me how infrequently people in my profession apologise. Everyone makes mistakes, why would a psychiatrist or an analyst be different? ‘We should learn to make the mistakes as fast as possible,’ Gus says. ‘It’s mistakes that let the light in.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘That was stupid of me. Of course everyone wants attention, provided it’s the right kind.’
    She laughed, none too cheerfully. ‘Who knows if this was the “right kind”? It was enough that I was paid any attention by anyone, let alone a man.’
    While I was a medical student, I took this tall, thin girl called Wanda Williams out on a date. Because it seemed expected of me, I put my arm round her at the cinema and afterwards she invited me back to her room, in a dismal part of London. When we got in she put on the kettle and then excused herselfto go to the bathroom. I was sitting on the bed, leafing through a magazine and wondering when I could decently say I was leaving, when she came back into the room. She’d taken off all her clothes and there was a line round the middle of her waist, where the elastic from her knickers had left a red mark, and another higher up where her bra had cut. I remember that the sight of these cruel-looking red impressions dividing up her pale flesh filled me with pity and dismay. I couldn’t leave after that, so I went to bed with her and watched my unenthusiastic but polite performance with the inner imager I rarely manage to switch off. It would have seemed rude to do otherwise but it depressed me no end.
    Several men to whom I’ve