"Well, to be brutally honest, we wouldn't actually want a woman around, would we, Jerry? I mean a game of squash isn't simply a game of squash, it's rather more than that.  You see, first there's the game. And then there's the shower. And then there's the pint. And then there's lunch. After all, you've been at it. You've had your battle. What you want is your pint and your lunch. You don't really want a woman buying you lunch."

But in Betrayal the battle continues on into these acts of camaraderie and locales of reconciliation. Indeed, it is here that the aggression is at its most sharp and cruel.

At the very end of the play, in the scene which depicts the beginning of the affair, Jerry, intoxicated and elated by wine and by Emma herself, courts her in wild effusive words which contrast strongly with the clipped obliquity which otherwise characterises the play's dialogue:

Look at the way you're looking at me. I can't wait for you, I'm bowled over, I'm totally knocked out, you dazzle me, you jewel, my jewel, I can't ever sleep again, no, listen, it's the truth, I won't walk, I'll be a cripple, I'll descend, I'll diminish, into total paralysis, my life is in your hands, that's what you're banishing me to, a state of catatonia, do you know the state of catatonia? do you? do you? the state of...where the reigning prince is the prince of emptiness, the prince of absence, the prince of desolation. I love you.

"You dazzle me" — it was a phrase which, we know, had a special significance for Pinter. In 1995, when accepting the David Cohen British Literature prize, he explained how an English teacher, Joe Brearley, had introduced him to the work of the Jacobean playwright John Webster. Pinter had been astonished and intoxicated by Webster's language, and recalled that he and Brearley, when out walking together, would declaim fragments of Webster's verse "at the passing trolley-buses or indeed to the passers-by".

One of these fragments was the words that Ferdinand speaks over the corpse of his sister, the Duchess of Malfi, whom he has persecuted to death, but whom he also loves: "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young." That early association of unhealthy desire with harm in the word "dazzle" was retrieved by Pinter when writing that speech for Jerry, in a play which so fruitfully meditates on how little separates affection from aggression. Corvo Rosso and Bianco, which seasoned pleasure with menace, were the ideal, Pinterian, wines from the 1970s to accompany that particular emotional dish