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disordered personality, and then start again, rebuild him from the ground up, as it were. Because this would be such a difficult, long-drawn-out process he would need all the support I could give him. For almost four years we had been working together. This clandestine relationship with Stella, however, this suggested that he was behaving toward me in bad faith. Far from attempting to examine the pathological manner in which he related to women, he was setting in motion the process that had led to murder once already, and had been the cause of his coming to us in the first place.
    Then something happened that I don’t think either of them consciously anticipated. They didn’t realize—and who does, in these sorts of affairs?—that the violence of feeling he had aroused in her would shatter the constraints of caution and common sense, and overwhelm their fragile status quo.
    It has not been easy to talk to Stella about the sex. She naturally finds it distasteful to be explicit. But she has described to me in detail how it began. It was another clear, bright, hot summer day, and she padded about the house in bare feet throughout the early afternoon, going from room to room, unable to be still. The sunshine streamed in through the windows of the big rooms downstairs, bringing up the burnish on the wood floors to a glare. She paused in front of the mirror over the fireplace and frowned at her reflection.
    She touched her hair. She went upstairs and changed into a loose summer frock with a low neck, then sat in front of her dressing-table mirror and put on fresh lipstick. She went back downstairs and stood at the French windows in the drawing room and gazed out across the back lawn. She poured herself a drink. That morning he had bluntly suggested she come into the conservatory with him. It had flustered her badly. It had sent her running down the path and back to the house. Sex with theman: the idea of it, long active in her imagination, frankly articulated had a terrible power.
    She left the house by the front door and crossed the drive to the gate in the high hedge opposite, which opened onto what had once been the front lawn but now, through neglect, had become a meadow of thick grass and wildflowers. She crossed the meadow to an arched opening in the garden wall close to the conservatory. She stood in the rounded archway with her back against the bricks and waited.
    She could hear him working. She could hear glass smashing in the dustbin. She knew he would soon become aware of her presence in the arch, for her shadow fell across the path. She wasn’t sure she could sustain herself there for very long. She felt that at any moment she would find her behavior ridiculous and abruptly go back inside.
    Silence. Then he was standing in front of her. Without a word she pulled him into the conservatory. She took his head in her hands and with her fingers spread across his cheeks she kissed him fiercely on the lips. They got down onto the floor, hidden from view by the low stone wall at the base of the frame. She rapidly arranged herself on the ground as he knelt over her unbuttoning his trousers.
    I probed her gently. I could not challenge directly her reluctance to talk about what happened next. We would return to it. I imagine it was urgent and primitive, a thing of hunger and instinct. I imagine he took her at once, without finesse, and that she wanted this, she was as avid as he was, no coyness now, no hesitation at all. And I imagine it was over rather quickly, and that afterward, flushed, burning, she ran back into the house and straight upstairs to the bathroom. I know that bathroom. The original fittings are all intact. The big tub with its tarnished brass taps stands on clawed feet on a floor of discolored tiles. A fern that flourishes in the steamy atmosphere of that large damp room overflows its terra-cotta pot by the door, and beside it there’s a large wicker laundry basket.
    Water gushed from the taps. She flung off