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we’d got over Christmas, and he and I had not exchanged cards. But I began to think less harshly of him. They were silly thoughts really. I hoped he was having little pleasures like eating in restaurants, and clean socks, and red wine the temperature he liked it, and even – yes, even ecstacies in bed with his wife. These thoughts made me smile to myself, inwardly, the new kind of smile I had discovered. I shuddered at the risk he’d run by seeing me at all. Of course the earlier injured thoughts battled with these new ones. It was like carrying a taper along a corridor where the draughts are fierce and the chances of it staying alight pretty meagre. I thought of him and my children in the same instant, their little foibles became his: my children telling me elaborate lies about their sporting feats, his slight puffing when we climbed steps and his trying to conceal it. The age difference between us must have saddened him. It was then I think that I really fell in love with him. His courtship of me, his telegrams, his eventual departure, even our lovemaking were nothing compared with this new sensation. It rose like sap within me, it often made me cry, the fact that he could not benefit from it! The temptation to ring him had passed away.
    His phone call came quite out of the blue. It was one of those times when I debated about answering it or not because mostly I let it ring. He asked if we could meet, if, and he said this so gently, my nerves were steady enough? I said my nerves were never better. That was a liberty I had to take. We met in a cafe for tea. Toast again. Just like the beginning. He asked how I was. Remarked on my good complexion. Neither of us mentioned the incident of the postcard. Nor did he say what impulse had moved him to telephone. It may not have been impulse at all. He talked about his work and how busy he’d been, and then relayed a little story about taking an elderly aunt for a drive and driving so slowly that she asked him to please hurry up because she would have walked there quicker.
    ‘You’ve recovered,’ he said then, suddenly. I looked at his face. I could see it was on his mind,
    ‘I’m over it,’ I said, and dipped my finger into the sugar bowl and let him lick the white crystals off the tip of my finger. Poor man. I could not have told him anything else, he would not have understood. In a way it was like being with someone else. He was not the one who had folded back the bedspread and sucked me dry and left his cigar ash for preserving. He was the representative of that one.
    ‘We’ll meet from time to time,’ he said.
    ‘Of course.’ I must have looked dubious.
    ‘Perhaps you don’t want to?’
    ‘Whenever you feel you would like to.’ I neither welcomed nor dreaded the thought. It would not make any difference to how I felt. That was the first time it occurred to me that all my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun’s cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people – but sitting there feeding him white sugar I thought, I now have entered a cell, and this man cannot know what it is for me to love him the way I do, and I cannot weigh him down with it, because he is in another cell confronted with other difficulties.
    The cell reminded me of a convent and for something to say I mentioned my sister the nun.
    ‘I went to see my sister.’
    ‘How is she?’ he asked. He had often inquired about her. He used to take an interest in her and ask what she looked like. I even got the impression that he had considered the thought of sleeping with her.
    ‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘We were walking down a corridor and she asked me to look around and make sure that there weren’t any other sisters looking and then she hoisted her skirts up and slid down the banisters.’
    ‘Dear girl,’ he said. He liked that story. The smallest things gave him such pleasure.
    I enjoyed our tea. It was one of the least