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"Your flowers are dead, Eddie."

"Are they? Throw them away."

Portia, lifting the daisies from the vase, looked with a sort of unmeaning repulsion at their slimy rotting stalks. "High time, too," said Eddie. "Perhaps that was the stink—In the waste paper basket, darling, under the table, there." He took up the vase and prepared to make off with it to the lavatory. But there was a dripping sound as Portia went on holding up the daisies. She said: "Eddie..."

He jumped.

"Why don't you open that letter from Anna?"

"Oh God! Is there one?"

"I mean the one you've just brought up. It hasn't got any stamp."

Eddie stood with the vase and gave a tortured giggle. "Hasn't it?" he said. "How extraordinary! She must have sent round by special messenger. I thought that looked like her writing...."

"Surely you must know it," said Portia coldly. She put down the daisies and watched them make a viscous pool on the cloth, then she took up the letter. "Or, I will."

"Shut up. Leave that alone!"

"Why? Why should I? What are you frightened of?"

"Apart from anything else, that's a letter to me. Don't be such a little rat!"

"Well, go on, read it. Why are you so frightened?

What are the private things you and she say?"

"I really couldn't tell you: you're too young."

"Eddie...”

"Well, leave me alone, damn you!"

"I don't care if I'm damned. What do you and she say?"

"Well, quite often we have talks about you."

"But you used to talk a lot before you got to know me, didn't you? Before you had said you loved me, or anything. I remember hearing you talking in the drawing-room, when I used to go up or down stairs, before I minded at all. Are you her lover?"

"You don't know what you're saying."

"I know it's something you're not with me. I wouldn't mind what you did, but I cannot bear the things I think now that you say."

"Then why keep asking?"

"Because I keep hoping you might tell me you were really saying something not that."

"Well, I am Anna's lover."

"Oh... Are you?"

"Don't you believe me?"

"I've got no way of telling."

"I thought it didn't seem to make much impression. Why make such a fuss if you don't know what you do want? As a matter of fact, I'm not: she's far too cautious and smart, and I don't think she's got any passion at all. She likes to be far more trouble."

"Then why do you—I mean, why—?"

"The trouble with you has been, from the very start, that you've been too anxious to get me taped."

"Have I? But you said we loved each other."

"You used to be much gentler, much more sweet. Yes, you used to be, as I once told you, the one person I could naturally love. But you're all different, lately, since Seale."

"Matchett says so too—Eddie, will you turn out the fire?"

"What's the matter—do you feel funny? What's made you feel funny? Why don't you sit down, then?" He came hurriedly round the table pinning her with a hard look, as though he dared her to crumple, to drop down out of sight. Then he put one stony hand on her shoulder and pushed her down into an armchair. His high-pitched insensibility was not being acted—he sat on the arm of the chair, as he so often used to do, stared boldly into the air above her head and giggled, as though the scene were as natural as it could ever be. "If you pass out here, darling, you'll lose me my job," he said. He took off her hat for her and put it down on the floor. "There, that's better. I do wish to God you smoked," he said. "Do you still not want the fire? And why should you pass out?"

"You said everything was over," Portia said, looking straight up into his eyes. They stayed locked in this incredulous look till Eddie flinched: he said: "Have I been unkind?"

"I've got no way of telling."

"I wish you had." Frowning, pulling his lip down in the familiar way, that made this the ghost of all their happier talks, he said: "Because I don't know, do you know. I may be some kind of monster; I've really got no idea.... The things I have to say seem never to have had to be said before.