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  'Conrad, what do you mean?'

  'I'm simply saying that if you, once upon a time, hadn't suddenly decided to drop me, none of this misery would have happened to either of us. We'd still be happily married to each other.'

  His face had suddenly taken on a queer sharp look.

  'Drop you?'

  'It was quite a shock, Anna.'

  'Oh dear,' she said, 'but everybody drops everybody else at that age, don't they?'

  'I wouldn't know,' Conrad said.

  'You're not cross with me still, are you, for doing that?'

  'Cross!' he said. 'Good God, Anna! Cross is what children get when they lose a toy! I lost a wife!'

  She stared at him, speechless.

  'Tell me,' he went on, 'didn't you have any idea how I felt at the time?'

  'But Conrad, we were so young.'

  'It destroyed me, Anna. It just about destroyed me.'

  'But how...'

  'How what?'

  'How, if it meant so much, could you turn right around and get engaged to somebody else a few weeks later?'

  'Have you never heard of the rebound?' he asked.

  She nodded, gazing at him in dismay.

  'I was wildly in love with you, Anna.'

  She didn't answer.

  'I'm sorry,' he said. 'That was a silly outburst. Please forgive me.'

  There was a long silence.

  Conrad was leaning back in his chair, studying her from a distance. She took another cigarette from the pack, and lit it. Then she blew out the match and placed it carefully in the ashtray. When she glanced up again, he was still watching her. There was an intent, far look in his eyes.

  'What are you thinking about?' she asked.

  He didn't answer.

  'Conrad,' she said, 'do you still hate me for doing what I did?'

  'Hate you?'

  'Yes, hate me. I have a queer feeling that you do. I'm sure you do, even after all these years.'

  'Anna,' he said.

  'Yes, Conrad?'

  He hitched his chair closer to the table, and leaned forward. 'Did it ever cross your mind...'

  He stopped.

  She waited.

  He was looking so intensely earnest all of a sudden that she leaned forward herself.

  'Did what cross my mind?' she asked.

  'The fact that you and I... that both of us... have a bit of unfinished business.'

  She stared at him.

  He looked back at her, his eyes as bright as two stars. 'Don't be shocked,' he said, 'please.'

  'Shocked?'

  'You look as though I'd just asked you to jump out of the window with me.'

  The room was full of people now, and it was very noisy. It was like being at a cocktail party. You had to shout to be heard.

  Conrad's eyes waited on her, impatient, eager.

  'I'd like another martini,' she said.

  'Must you?'

  'Yes,' she said, 'I must.'

  In her whole life, she had been made love to by only one man - her husband, Ed.

  And it had always been wonderful.

  Three thousand times?

  She thought more. Probably a good deal more. Who counts?

  Assuming, though, for the sake of argument, that the exact figure (for there has to be an exact figure) was three thousand, six hundred and eighty...

  ... and knowing that every single time it happened it was an act of pure, passionate, authentic love-making between the same man and the same woman...

  ... then how in heaven's name could an entirely new man, an unloved stranger, hope to come in suddenly on the three thousand, six hundred and eighty-first time and be even halfway acceptable?

  He'd be a trespasser.

  All the memories would come rushing back. She would be lying there suffocated by memories.

  She had raised this very point with Dr Jacobs during one of her sessions a few months back, and old Jacobs had said, 'There will be no nonsense about memories, my dear Mrs Cooper. I wish you would forget that. Only the present will exist.'

  'But how do I get there?' she had said. 'How can I summon up enough nerve suddenly to go upstairs to a bedroom and take off my clothes in front of a new man, a stranger, in cold blood?...'

  'Cold blood!' he had cried. 'Good God, woman, it'll be boiling hot!' And later he had said, 'Do at any rate try to believe me, Mrs Cooper, when I tell you that any woman who has been deprived of sexual congress after more than twenty years of practice - of uncommonly frequent practice in your case, if I understand you correctly - any woman in those circumstances is going to suffer continually from severe psychological disturbances until the routine is re-established. You are feeling a lot better, I know that, but it is my duty to inform you that you are by no means back to normal...'

  To Conrad, Anna said, 'This isn't by any chance a therapeutic suggestion, is it?'

  'A what?'

  'A therapeutic suggestion.'

  'What in the world do you mean?'

  'It sounds exactly like a plot hatched up by my Dr Jacobs.'

  'Look,' he said, and now he leaned right across the table and touched her left hand with the tip of one finger. 'When I knew you before, I was too damn young and nervous to make that sort of a proposition, much as I wanted to. I didn't think there was any particular hurry then, anyway. I figured we had a whole lifetime before us. I wasn't to know you were going to drop me.'

  Her martini arrived. Anna picked it up and began to drink it fast. She knew exactly what it was going to do to her. It was going to make her float. A third martini always did that. Give her a third martini and within seconds her body would become completely weightless and she would go floating around the room like a wisp of hydrogen gas.

  She sat there holding the glass with both hands as though it were a sacrament. She took another gulp. There was not much of it left now. Over the rim of her glass she could see Conrad watching her with disapproval as she drank. She smiled at him radiantly.

  'You're not against the use of anaesthetics when you operate, are you?' she asked.

  'Please, Anna, don't talk like that.'

  'I am beginning to float,' she said.

  'So I see,' he answered. 'Why don't you stop there?'

  'What did you say?'

  'I said, why don't you stop?'

  'Do you want me to tell you why?'

  'No,' he said. He made a little forward movement with his hands as though he were going to take her glass away from her, so she quickly put it to her lips and tipped it high, holding it there for a few seconds to allow the last drop to run out. When she looked at Conrad again, he was placing a ten-dollar bill on the waiter's tray, and the waiter was saying. 'Thank you, sir. Thank you indeed,' and the next thing she knew she was floating out of the room and across the lobby of the hotel with Conrad's hand cupped lightly under one of her elbows, steering her toward the elevators. They floated up to the twenty-second floor, and then along the corridor to the door of her bedroom. She fished the key out of her purse and unlocked the door and floated inside. Conrad followed, closing the door behind him. Then very suddenly, he grabbed hold of her and folded her up in his enormous arms and started kissing her with great gusto.

  She let him do it.

  He kissed her all over her mouth and cheeks and neck, taking deep breaths in between the kisses. She kept her eyes open, watching him in a queer detached sort of way, and the view she got reminded her vaguely of the blurry close-up view of a dentist's face when he is working on an upper back tooth.

  Then all of a sudden, Conrad put his tongue into one of her ears. The effect of this upon her was electric. It was as though a live two-hundred-volt plug had been pushed into an empty socket, and all the lights came on and the bones began to melt and the hot molten sap went running down into her limbs and she exploded into a frenzy. It was the kind of marvellous, wanton, reckless, flaming frenzy that Ed used to provoke in her so very often in the olden days by just a touch of the hand here and there. She flung her arms arou