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A nameless middle-aged man meets a woman in a bar and proceeds to tell her about a doomed love affair he once experienced. The first and last chapter takes place in this bar while the rest of the book is his story. The woman he fell in love with was a young divorcee with a child and while things were going well for a while, she later meets a rich bloke called Howard who offers her money and so things take a turn. After that, it becomes a more adversarial relationship, the power dynamics and transactional nature of love an obvious theme in the book. People are often looking for different things and will manipulate the other in order to get them. This aspect aside, the book is an otherwise very basic story and I would argue the majority of your enjoyment will come from the writing style which Hayes has to offer. Some of it is quite beautiful, a kind of wispish romanticism that was common to the era (or a nostalgic version of this). I also got some flashbacks to the Great Gatsby, a sense of being out of time, lost in jazz music and the rise of burgeoning modernity. Some of the sentences whirl along, slither like snakes that never end, and Hayes clearly has a penchant for the decorous and poetic.

'All I knew, really, was that she had taken away with her when she had gone something which in the past had held me together, some necessary sense of myself, something without which I seemed in danger of collapsing; and whatever it was, an indispensable vanity, an irreplaceable idea of my own invulnerability, it was gone and only she could restore it to me, or so I thought.

It's a nice little novella, a little on the lightweight side (too much to be truly great), but it's very well-written. I wish I could say I loved it more than I actually did but the truth is, I was always slightly uninterested in the actual story. If I ever read this again, however, I would almost certainly ignore the story and focus my attention on the writing which is occasionally fluid and lyrical, and something that reaches genuine heights of sumptuous, liquid prose. My first reading is usually focused on the plot and characters, neither of which especially grabbed me here, so I only mildly enjoyed it. But the second reading, whenever I get around to it, ought to be a far more rewarding experience. A nice little gem that's definitely worth your time.