Chris Cooper had cautioned her about taking her professional self too seriously: “So the prospect of an Active Life opens before you? Don’t become a Career Woman, with black tailored suit and horn-rimmed glasses!” He suggested that her new interest in politics “might fill the gap caused by the absence of a sentimental side.” In fact Shirley’s sentimental side was not neglected for long; her time at the UN would be dominated not only by her ready engagement in its internal politics but also, and more intensely, with affairs of the heart. The most significant of these was a clandestine relationship lasting nearly three years with the director of Technical Assistance special fund operations, Arthur (known as Tex) Goldschmidt, but there were other flirtations, moody, unfulfilled. They troubled not so much her heart as her sense of social ease and confidence; sometimes friendly and pleasurable, often less than that. The men with whom she was involved through these years were significantly older, and most were married, which of course did not make for straightforward relations. More important, there was a sense across these experiences of an inclination for complication—of access, of security, of desire itself—that almost always precluded any chance of a happy conclusion. And this, even while she was inexperienced in the world of sex and matters of the heart to a degree that created no little anguish.

Her work at the TAA was low-level and routine: recording minutes of meetings, typing, filing, all of it less than stimulating. She seems to have approached it with some disdain, and her efforts were rewarded with similar lack of approval and little advancement. For intellectual enrichment she turned to her new colleagues, her own extensive reading, and the cultural energy to be found everywhere in mid-century Manhattan. She later recalled her first summer in New York, going with friends from the office to see Geraldine Page’s legendary performance in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke at the Circle in the Square Theatre in the Village; she was, she felt, “in New York at last … No air-conditioning then. The heat was inhuman, and suited the atmosphere of authenticity.” She went on buying books. As ever, she was consumed with poetry: always Auden, collections by Pound, Joyce, MacNeice, Robert Graves, Roy Campbell. And prose. Graham Greene was a perennial, but also Denton Welch’s coming-of-age novella In Youth Is Pleasure and, rapturously, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (“I am almost incoherent with admiration for her”). In the spring she took a short holiday alone to a resort in Bermuda. She lay in the sun and read Sade’s Justine and Balzac’s Cousin Pons, resisted advances from men, and made friends with two women from her hotel, a Mrs. Friedland and her mother, Mrs. Katzmann, both “so outspoken and intelligent and pleasant and we discussed civil liberties.”

When Shirley was detailed to work with him through the early summer of 1953, at the end of the emotionally taxing year of her liaison with Howard, she was ready to fall in love again. Tex, as he would later disclose to her, had had affairs before, approaching them as something extraneous to his family life: “I’ve been unfaithful to my wife but I don’t make a practice of it and I don’t carry a load of guilt: it’s just as though I danced with someone.” This could not have been more different from Shirley’s approach to the affair, laden not just with her own sexual innocence but with an intensity and a vulnerability more in keeping with an even younger woman. She knew nothing about contraception, and Tex took responsibility for this. Their affair progressed through snatched hours here and there, at her apartment or his if the family was away, maintaining lighthearted and friendly relations at the office as a cover. The rushed nature of these encounters took their toll on Shirley. She was insecure, demanding of reassurance, and again her behaviour and insecurity provoked irritation and frustration in herself as well as her lover.

Increasingly, she came into the life of Tex’s family, joining them for dinner, outings to the theatre or concerts, and on weekend visits to their country house in the Catskills, much as she had with the Daniels. Ann, then in her early teens, remembered Shirley as a rather prim young woman from the office whom her father thought promising and whom he had wanted to help. Arthur Junior, a little older, had a crush on Shirley, whom he thought beautiful, an older woman. Shirley took him to concerts and shared recorded music with him. He once tried to take her hand during a recital and she calmly withdrew hers, “as if she were an older sister.” Shirley never developed a friendship with Wicky, although she wrote in her diary that she tried to like her, as she had, more successfully, Judith Daniel. She remained resistant to the feminist principles that governed Wicky’s personal and professional life, preferring the more conventional hostilities prefigured by adultery. In mid-1955, writing in her diary about a telephone call from the Catskills house, ostensibly about a work matter, she noted that she could hear Wicky and the children in the background, and reflected that she was having, in Donne’s phrase, “correspondence while the foe stood by.” She immediately caught herself: “‘Foe’ is too much of a word; ‘foe’ would be a salve to my conscience. It is the trust I can’t bear, and the friendliness—and my treachery.” In early 1955, after an outing with the Goldschmidts, Shirley reflected that

Wicky seemed—perhaps it is my guilty imagination—a little short. When Tex asked if she wanted to go straight home she said, “unless you and Shirley want to elope.” He said to me “How would you like that?” “That would be wonderful, but do we take Wicky and [their third child] Jeannie along for ballast?” So it goes on and I loathe myself. Shakespeare had a few words to say about this sort of thing in the “Let Me Confess” sonnet:

“I may not evermore acknowledge thee
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame;
Nor thou with public kindness honour me.
Unless thou take that honour from thy name.”

Inevitably, but not until the summer of 1956, Wicky learned of the affair. Tex phoned Shirley midweek and then went to Wicky in the Catskills, not returning until the following Sunday. The separation of the adulterous lovers Nettie and Clem in “A Place in the Country” echoes Shirley’s diary entry, at key points almost verbatim:

“Remember…” she began.
“What?”
“About my love.”
“Yes.”
“No one will ever love you so much.”
“No, I know,” he said with slight impatience, as if this were irrelevant. After a moment he added: “Yes, it has been worth it.” His tone was historic, she thought, like a farewell.

Then Nettie wonders, “What has it been worth? What is to happen to me? What am I to suffer? Calamity has a generalizing effect, and as yet she could foresee her suffering only in a monumental way and not in its inexorable, annihilating detail.” For the first days, Shirley was consumed first with “just terror and nausea and anxiety,” and then “the same, but for a sense of relief, in a strange way, that now there would be decision, finality, an end of concealment.” When Tex came to her apartment, at noon on the Sunday, “I knew it was all over.”