Apparently I had missed another cue, because she broke our kiss and pushed me slightly away. For an instant I thought she might be abandoning her role, but her half-closed eyes and twisted mouth told me otherwise. She had parted her legs and was reaching for potential posterity.

`Linda,' I said quietly. (No nonsense about movies this time.) `Linda,' I said again. One of her hands was playing Virgil to my Dente and trying to lead him into the underworld, but I held Dente back. `Linda,' I said a third time.

`Put it in,' she said.

`Linda, wait a minute.'

`What's the matter; put it in.'

She opened her eyes and stared up, not seeming to recognize me.

`Linda, I've got my period.'

Now why I said that Freud certainly knows, but searching for absurdity I had said it, and, realizing its psychoanalytic meaning, I felt quite shamed.

Linda either hadn't read Freud or didn't care; she was, I saw regretfully, on the verge of passing from Bardot to bitch without any intermediate third Linda.

She blinked once, started to say something which came out as a snort, twitched her upper lip three, four times, half closed her eyes again, groaned and said, `Oh come, please come into me, now. Now.'

Although her hands weren't pulling, my stallion responded to those words with enthusiasm and had galloped to within one and one eighth inches of the valley of the stars when the mad scientist pulled the reins.

`Linda, there's something I'd like you to do, first,' I said (What? What? For God's sake, what?) This was, in fact, the perfect statement: she couldn't tell whether it was something sexual I wanted her to do, in which case she could revel in her Bardot role, or something impractical having to do with my being a psychiatrist. Curiosity, stronger than Bardot or bitch, looked out of fully open eyes.