MG: I never tried to. But there’s a book of her love letters to Charles Ritchie, and I did know him very well. He was Canadian. I knew his whole family. I was married from his aunt’s house in Ottawa. Bowen was married to the head of the BBC and it was an unconsummated marriage. I don’t know what happened. She wouldn’t leave him to go marry Ritchie, the love of her life and her lover for years. And he got fed up with the situation. In the long run he may have felt it was humiliating for him to hang around.

MG: La vie en France. I would not have been happy if I had not tried. I had to try and I had to do it before I was thirty. I didn’t want to marry again. I travelled alone most of the time. I liked it. When you’re young you meet people very easily. You stand on a street corner and you have to beat them off with a baseball bat.

MG: Oh yes. One thing is, men don’t know how women talk when they’re together, just as we really don’t know how men talk among themselves. You have to rather intuit it from something the man will let drop. And you’ll think, ‘Oh, so they do gossip.’

JL: People often ask me a question I find ridiculous. They ask why the main character of my novel is male. They think it’s something radical I’ve done. And I want to say, ‘Well have you ever read any Mavis Gallant? Every other story is from the point of view of a man.’ Or, ‘Have you read Chekhov, where every other story is from the point of view of a woman?’

MG: Not to speak of Flaubert.

JL: People seem to have no context about the history of writing and what writers have done all along.

Was it too late for him to change? To undergo one final metamorphosis? I am not what I am! That was Haffner's constant wish, his mantra. He was a man replete with mantras. He would not act his age, or his Age. He would not be what others made of him.

And yet; and yet.

In 1974, in the last year of his New York life, when Barbra -- who was twenty-nine, worked in the Wall Street office as his secretary and smoked Dunhills which she kept in a cigarette holder, triple facts that made her desirable to Haffner as he passed middle age -- asked him why it was he still went faithfully back every night to his wife, he could not answer. It didn't have to be like that, she said. With irritation, as he looked at Barbra, the steep curve between her breasts, he remembered his snooker table in the annexe at home, its blue blaize built over by Livia's castles of unread books. He knew that the next morning he would be there, at home: with his breakfast of Corn Chex, morosely reading the Peanuts cartoons. He knew this, and did not want to know it. So often, he wanted to give up, and elope from his history. The problem was in finding the right elopee. He only had Haffner. And Haffner wasn't enough.

'So,' she said. 'You've been married thirty-five years. Well, look, Dr Langford -- '

[...]

'[...] It's like this. Unless your wife is doing crack cocaine or having sex with young girls and barnyard animals, what little you have will be split fifty/fifty.'

'Oh, it's very hard,' Clare says, sitting down slowly and not too close. 'Oh, I miss him so much. I didn't know. I didn't know that I would be like this, that this is what happens when you love someone like that. I had no idea. No one says, there's no happy ending at all. No one says, if you could look ahead, you might want to stop now. I know, I know, I know I was lucky. I was luckier than anyone to have had what I had. I know now. I do, really.'