Chapter 4. Book I: The Dream. A Memoir of the Future

The night of Rosemary's sexual triumph was busily spent in luxuriating in her mistress's bed, her husband and her husband's downfall; she was conscious of the pleasure she felt at his weakness in succumbing to her seductions. It was his marriage and home, as well as Alice's, that she was destroying. The degradation of her class, of her beauty, was being avenged; that night she knew what it was to be the initiator. The feelings obscured the anxiety which had been her constant companion for months during which the successful invasion, its details unknown, had swept over her homeland. ‘Her homeland …’ – the phrase aroused her scorn. It was not her homeland; it was the homeland of the rich, the powerful, the dull, the respectable, the cheats, the hypocrites. How smug Alice had been when questioning her – damn her bloody impertinence! – about her ‘followers’, her ‘lovers’! Rosemary remembered her fears (groundless, as it turned out) that she had been made pregnant by the powerful but dim-witted man-of-all-work, Tom. ‘You must have encouraged him’, Alice said. ‘Tom has always been a good worker; certainly I have never known him to be anything but respectful.’ Rosemary had dabbed her tear-stained face and stolen a surreptitious glance as she stood, submissively, before her mistress. ‘Yes, Miss – I mean, no, Miss’, she said demurely. Neither would have admitted sarcasm or ironical denial. Both were unaware that the scene in which they were actors was anything but real, so well had they learned their parts; the past was unknown, the present unobserved; the ‘future’ was in fact at hand this very night, as Rosemary played sensuously with Roland in Alice's bed.

She had again been ‘encouraging’ Tom. She and Roland were taken by surprise nevertheless. ‘What's that?’ said Roland sitting up

with a start. ‘It frightened me too’, said Rosemary as she soothed him back into her arms, but she was laughing too. A muffled scream had been followed by sounds of physical struggle. ‘What was