‘For Ford’s sake, John, talk sense. I can’t understand a word you say. First it’s vacuum cleaners; then it’s knots. You’re driving me crazy.’ She jumped up and, as though afraid that he might run away from her physically, as well as with his mind, caught him by the wrist. ‘Answer me this question: do you really like me, or don’t you?’

There was a moment’s silence; then, in a very low voice, ‘I love you more than anything in the world,’ he said.

‘Then why on earth didn’t you say so?’ she cried, and so intense was her exasperation that she drove her sharp nails into the skin of his wrist. ‘Instead of drivelling away about knots and vacuum cleaners and lions, and making me miserable for weeks and weeks.’

She released his hand and flung it angrily away from her.

‘If I didn’t like you so much,’ she said, ‘I’d be furious with you.’

And suddenly her arms were round his neck; he felt her lips soft against his own. So deliciously soft, so warm and electric that inevitably he found himself thinking of the embraces in Three Weeks in a Helicopter. Ooh! ooh! the stereoscopic blonde and aah! the more than real blackamoor. Horror, horror, horror … he tried to disengage himself; but Lenina tightened her embrace.

‘Why didn’t you say so?’ she whispered, drawing back her face to look at him. Her eyes were tenderly reproachful.

‘The murkiest den, the most opportune place’ (the voice of conscience thundered poetically), ‘the strongest suggestion our worser genius can, shall never melt mine honour into lust. Never, never!’ he resolved.

‘You silly boy!’ she was saying. ‘I wanted you so much. And if you wanted me too, why didn’t you? …’

‘But, Lenina …’ he began protesting; and as she immediately untwined her arms, as she stepped away from him, he thought, for a moment, that she had taken his unspoken hint. But when she unbuckled her white patent cartridge belt and hung it carefully over the back of a chair, he began to suspect that he had been mistaken.

‘Lenina!’ he repeated apprehensively.

She put her hand to her neck and gave a long vertical pull; her white sailor’s blouse was ripped to the hem; suspicion condensed into a too, too solid certainty. ‘Lenina, what are you doing?’

Zip, zip! Her answer was wordless. She stepped out of her bell-bottomed trousers. Her zippicamiknicks were a pale shell pink. The Arch-Community-Songster’s golden T dangled at her breast.

‘For those milk paps that through the window bars bore at men’s eyes …’ The singing, thundering, magical words made her seem doubly dangerous, doubly alluring. Soft, soft, but how piercing! boring and drilling into reason, tunnelling through resolution. ‘The strongest oaths are straw to the fire i’ the blood. Be more abstemious, or else …’

Zip! The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left: the zippicamiknicks were lying lifeless and as though deflated on the floor.

Still wearing her shoes and socks, and her rakishly tilted round white cap, she advanced towards him. ‘Darling. Darling! If only you’d said so before!’ She held out her arms.

But instead of also saying ‘Darling!’ and holding out his arms, the Savage retreated in terror, flapping his hands at her as though he were trying to scare away some intruding and dangerous animal. Four backward steps, and he was brought to bay against the wall.