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[...] On that first evening he stayed late. He was courting me. He was talking about me, the sort of life I led. And women always respond at once to men who understand we are on some kind of frontier. I suppose I could say that they 'name' us. We feel safe with them. [...]

He is a man of about forty, Jewish, American, pleasant-looking, a bit of a paterfamilias.

'But I don't hold the belief that some books are for the minority. You know I don't. I don't hold the aristocratic view of art.'

'My dear Anna, your attitude to art is so aristocratic that you write, when you do, for yourself only.'

'And so do all the others,' I heard myself muttering.

And so we laughed, and it might have ended there, but I went on: 'You talk about individuation. So far what it has meant to me is this: that the individual recognises one part after another of his earlier life as an aspect of the general human experience. When he can say: What I did then, what I fe…

'No. You ask such a lot. Happiness. That sort of thing. Happiness! I don't remember thinking about it. Your lot- you seem to think something's owed to you. It's because of the communists.'

'What?' says Ella, startled and amused.

'Yes, your lot, you're all reds.'

'But I'm not a communist. Y…