<D 1958>[Chatto & Windus]
<A I. MURDOCH>
<T Bell>
<C i>
<P 7>
Dora Greenfield left her husband because she
was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return
to him for the same reason. The absent Paul, haunting her
with letters and telephone bells and imagined footsteps on
the stairs had begun to be the greater torment. Dora suffered
from guilt, and with guilt came fear. She decided at last that
the persecution of his presence was to be preferred to the
persecution of his absence.
Dora was still very young, though she vaguely thought of
herself as past her prime. She came of a lower middle-class
London family. Her father had died when she was nine years
old, and her mother, with whom she had never got on very
well, had married again. When Dora was eighteen she
entered the Slade school of art with a scholarship, and had
been there two years when she encountered Paul. The role
of an art student suited Dora. It was indeed the only role she
had ever been able whole-heartedly to pla . . .
