I got hold of the books she’d asked for – almost immediately, of course. I telephoned her. She came. And it was all so easy that … She hung around chatting until closing time. I lowered the shutters and we talked some more, and all along I was thinking: ‘She’s going to leave now’, ‘She’ll leave any second’, ‘Why isn’t she leaving?’, ‘Surely she’s going to leave’. I didn’t know how to get rid of her. I asked if she wanted to go for a walk and she said she did. We walked. We walked some more. ‘Now she’s going to get on a bus. Surely now she’ll leave. She has to leave. Why isn’t she leaving?’ I realise the reader will be wondering what kind of an idiot I am. Well, you’d be wondering a lot more than that, I can assure you, and in a lot more detail, too, if you’d seen those firm legs encased in black fishnet stockings, which were so generously displayed when she sat down in the bookshop; if you’d seen the look in her eye, if you’d felt her air of docile availability. Yes, reader; you have the right to think as you do. I thought that way myself, and sometimes I still do, especially when I wake up with liver trouble. But at the time, all I wanted was to be rid of her, was for her to leave.