You could go on like that for ever – all the way back to London.

But if you weren’t in love with her – what then? Net profit? 2s. 6d. Net? Nestlé’s Milk Chocolate? Presumably. But in that case, of course, you wouldn’t think about it at all. It was only because you were crazy about her you went on like this. So crazy that your heart sank when you saw your own shoes, or looked at a woman wearing a hair-net on Heacham station.

Crazy. Perhaps he was really crazy – dotty. With these awful ‘dead’ moods of his – twenty-four-hour slices of life concerning which he remembered nothing – you could hardly call him normal. But he had been into all that and decided there was nothing to worry about. No. He was sane enough. If you didn’t count the ‘dead’ moods, he was sane enough. In fact he was probably too sane, too normal. If only he was a little more erratic, if only he had a little fire, a little originality or audacity, it might have been a different story. A different story with Netta and all along the line.

He was, of course, completely without ambition. He wasn’t like Netta. He didn’t want to hang about film people and theatre people and try to make a lot of money easily. He didn’t want anything, except Netta. She, of course, would hoot with laughter if she knew what he really wanted. He wanted a cottage in the country – yes, a good old cottage in the country – and he wanted Netta as his wife. No children. Just Netta – and to live with her happily and quietly ever afterwards. He would love her, physically love her, even when she was old. He was certain of that, though sophistication condemned the idea as absurd. She was, to him, so utterly different from any other girl that the thought of tiring of her physically was unimaginable.

And how she would jeer at him if she knew this was what he wanted – how they would all jeer at him. ‘I believe poor old George,’ he could hear Peter saying, ‘wants you to go down into the country and be a milk-maid or something.’ And yet he wouldn’t mind betting that half the men who were, or had been, in love with Netta wanted very little else – the trouble was they wouldn’t admit it.

But they could hide it successfully – which was what, apparently, he couldn’t do. Maybe that was because they didn’t feel it as deeply, want it as badly, as he did. He couldn’t hide it. He had no illusions about himself: he knew exactly what she and all that Earl’s Court gang thought of him. They saw him as a poor, dumb, adoring, obvious, cow-like appendage to Netta – ever-present or ever-turning up.