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as you pull out,’ she whispered (did she think
I
was a virgin, perhaps?). Then I got up and walked to the bathroom, the filled condom occasionally slapping against the inside of my thighs. As I disposed of it I came to a decision and a conclusion: No, it went, no.
    ‘You selfish bastard,’ she said, the next time we met.
    ‘Yes, well, there it is.’
    ‘That practically makes it rape.’
    ‘I don’t think anything at all makes it that.’
    ‘Well, you might have had the decency to tell me beforehand.’
    ‘I didn’t know beforehand.’
    ‘Oh, so it was that bad?’
    ‘No, it was good. It’s just …’
    ‘Just what?’
    ‘You were always asking me to think about our relationship and so now perhaps I have. I did.’
    ‘Bravo. It must have been hard.’
    I thought: And I haven’t even seen her breasts, in all this time. Felt them, but not seen them. Also, she’s completely wrong about Dvo ř ák and Tchaikovsky. What’s more, I’ll be able to play my LP of
Un Homme et Une Femme
as often as I like. Openly.
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘Jesus, Tony, you can’t even concentrate
now
. My brother was right about you.’
    I knew I was meant to ask what Brother Jack had said, but I didn’t want to give her the pleasure. As I remained silent, she went on,
    ‘And don’t say that thing.’
    Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
    ‘What thing?’
    ‘About us still being able to be friends.’
    ‘Is that what I’m meant to say?’
    ‘You’re meant to say what you
think
, what you
feel
, for Christ’s sake, what you
mean
.’
    ‘All right. In that case I won’t say it – what I’m meant to say. Because I don’t think we can still be friends.’
    ‘Well done,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Well done.’
    ‘But let me ask you a question then. Did you sleep with me to get me back?’
    ‘I don’t have to answer your questions any more.’
    ‘In which case, why wouldn’t you sleep with me when we were going out together?’
    No answer.
    ‘Because you didn’t need to?’
    ‘Perhaps I didn’t want to.’
    ‘Perhaps you didn’t want to because you didn’t need to.’
    ‘Well, you can believe what it suits you to believe.’
    The next day, I took a milk jug she’d given me down to the Oxfam shop. I hoped she’d see it in the window. But when I stopped to check, there was something else on show instead: a small coloured lithograph of Chislehurst I’d given her for Christmas.
    At least we were studying different subjects, and Bristol was a large enough city for us only occasionally to half-run into one another. The times we did, I would be hit by a sense of what I can only call pre-guilt: the expectation that she was going to say or do something that would make me feel properly guilty. But she never deigned to speak to me, so this apprehension gradually wore off. And I told myself I didn’t have anything to feel guilty about: we were both near-adults, responsible for our own actions, who had freely entered into a relationship which hadn’t worked out. No one had got pregnant, no one had got killed.
    In the second week of the summer vacation a letter arrived with a Chislehurst postmark. I inspected the unfamiliar handwriting – looping and slightly careless – on the envelope. A female hand: her mother, no doubt. Another burst of pre-guilt: perhaps Veronica had suffered a nervous collapse, become wasted and even more waiflike. Or perhaps she had peritonitis and was asking for me from her hospital bed. Or perhaps … but even I could tell these were self-important fantasies. The letter was indeed from Veronica’s mother; it was brief and, to my surprise, not in the least accusatory. She was sorry to hear we had broken up, and sure I would find someone more suitable. But she didn’t appear to mean this in the sense that I was a scoundrel who deserved someone of equally low moral character. Rather, she implied the opposite: that I was well out of things, and she hoped the best for me. I wish