'Nonsense!' I said. Yet I wondered if she wasn't right. 'She won't find out,' I said, 'and if she did, I'd manage. You are essential to me.' 'No one is essential to anyone,' said Georgie. 'There you go looking at your watch again. All right, go if you must. What about one for the road? Shall I open that bottle of Nuits de Young?' 'How many times must I tell you never to drink claret unless it has been open at least three hours?' 'Don't be so holy about it,' said Georgie. 'As far as I'm concerned the stuff is just booze.' 'Little barbarian!' I said affectionately. 'You can give me some gin and French. Then I really must go.' Georgie brought me the glass and we sat enlaced like a beautiful netsuke in front of the warm murmuring fire. Her room seemed a subterranean place, remote, enclosed, hidden. It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story. I pushed up the sleeve of her jersey and stroked her arm. 'Wonderful stuff, flesh.' 'When'll I see you?' said Georgie. 'Not till after Christmas,' I said. ‘I’ll come if I can about the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth. But I'll ring up anyway before that.' 'I wonder if we'll ever be able to be more open about this?' said Georgie. 'I do rather hate the lies. Well, I suppose not.' 'Not,' I said. I didn't like the hard words she used, but I had to give it her back as sharply. 'We're stuck with the lies, I'm afraid. Yet, you know, this may sound perverse, but part of the nature, almost of the charm, of this relation is its being so utterly private.' 'You mean its being clandestine is of its essence,' said Georgie, 'and if it were exposed to the daylight it would crumble to pieces? I don't think I like that idea.'