I think he knew a little about you, or he pretended to. I told him you’d broken your wrist. It was just a casual conversation but there was something in his voice and his insistent questions that made me think he was jealous-he seemed to assume something had happened between you and me. A couple of times I think he was on the point of asking. And in the days that followed, every so often he’d somehow bring up my free month. He even read one of your books and made fun of it. I’d say nothing but that seemed to annoy him even more. A week later he changed tack. He became unusually silent. He hardly spoke to me and I thought he was going to fire me.”

“So I was right,” I said. “He was in love with you.”

“Those days were the most difficult. He didn’t dictate anything at all, just paced the room, as if he were trying to come to a decision that had nothing to do with his novel. Something about me. And suddenly, one morning, he started dictating again normally, as if nothing had happened. Actually, not quite normally: he seemed to be inspired. Until then he’d dictated at the most one or two paragraphs a day, going over them obsessively, line by line. But that day he dictated a long and rather horrifying scene in one go: a series of murders, throat-slittings by the religious assassins. He seemed transformed. He’d never dictated so fast-I had trouble keeping up. But I thought everything was OK again. I really needed that job so I was terribly worried about him firing me. He continued dictating at that pace for almost two hours and as we went on his mood seemed to get better and better. When I stopped to go and get more coffee, he even made a couple of jokes. I stood up and suddenly realised how stiff my neck was. I had a problem with it in those days,” she said, as if she were trying to prove her innocence with this belated explanation.

“Yes, I remember very well,” I said drily. “Though I was always a bit suspicious of those neck aches of yours.”