Chaos ensued in the household. Horrie immediately loosened all her tight things and with my aid, lifted her legs onto the couch and laid her straight. Pulses and breathing were desperately sought, and both found intact. Still, Howie was despatched to the home of a neighbour who was a nurse, and I was left to guard the unconscious woman while Horrie ran to the telephone to summon an ambulance.
    In the pause while the nurse assured us that the vital signs were good and before the sirens could be heard in the distance, Horrie glared at me. “You bloody sure it was her?” he asked.
    It was the culmination of eighteen years of mental cruelty that allowed me to dob her in without remorse.
“Cors it bloody was.”
“I’ll kill her.”

…I could still feel murmuring in her throat, and crack, I choked her harder, and crack, choked her again, and crack, gave her payment – never halt now – and crack the door flew open and the wire tore at her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea, a bleak string of salts. I was floating. I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeling in a dream. To my closed eyes Deborah’s face seemed to float from her body and stare at me in darkness. She gave one malevolent look which said: “There are dimensions of evil which reach beyond light,” and then she smiled like a milkmaid and floated away and was gone. And in the midst of that Oriental splendour of landscape, I felt the touch of her finger on my shoulder, radiating some faint but ineradicable pulse of detestation into the new grace. I opened my eyes. I was weary with a most honourable fatigue, and my flesh seemed new. I had not felt so nice since I was twelve. It seemed inconceivable at this instant that anything in life could fail to please. But there was Deborah, dead beside me on the flowered carpet of the floor, and there was no question of that. She was dead, indeed she was dead.
    Another colonial trying to blend the New and Old Worlds was Norman Mailer, a journalist trying to write novels, with An American Dream, about a man who gets clean away with murder. It tried to marry European Nihilism with American pioneer spirit and fell somewhere in the middle, dwindling away to a non-ending because it had nowhere to go. The first part of it is sensational – the bit where he bumps off the wife (two red-hot pages of which the above is a mere sample) and successfully treads the minefield of police interrogation and his own guilt… That is the problem, sort of, it offers too much and delivers too little. That the man subdues his conscience through love and achieves a great ability to lie, even to himself, is tedious and disappointing even if it is true. Halfway into the greatest novel written in America up to that time, Mailer didn’t know how to end it. But then, I don’t suppose anyone could have.