Alex would cross galaxies in search of someone like Birdie. That’s what he used to say to her. No matter what black hole, or nebula of inarticulate emotion she was lost in, he would come like Yuri Gagarin in his Sputnik, and he’d find her. What about the time he brought her to London? The cocktail bar? Well?

The suits and the long dresses. The chubby manager in his green double-breasted tweeds fussing over Mr Delaney. Alex had a coherence about him that people loved to lean on. An air of authority. And no end of money. Good aftershave.

The world is divided into men who love women, and men who can’t. That’s what he said.

Oh, Birdie, the virgins of the forest said, he’s divine! Charming, polished and stylish. He’s so commanding. He has his two feet on the ground. He has. And he never lost his sense of humour. But most of all you could tell him anything and it didn’t unsettle him.

They checked into the hotel in London in the early hours of the morning. They had taken the night train from Holyhead. Alex signed the book with his Parker fountain pen, while Birdie perched on a sofa in the foyer and gripped her handbag as if she was clutching a lifebelt on the deck of the Titanic. She was terrified. London if you don’t mind. And they weren’t a year married. Now that was a weekend in Technicolour!

Ten minutes later Birdie was stretched on the bed upstairs in a swanky hotel bathrobe, and Alex was sitting upright and expectant in a green plastic chair beside the window. The tall buildings of London town behind him. A cactus on the coffee table beside him, like a little green hedgehog. There was a wireless above the bed with ivory knobs. She fumbled with it until she found orchestral music. The strings of gentlemen in dinner jackets. Everything was velvet. It was hardly nine o’clock, but she ran the hot water in the bath and he actually took off his clothes in front of her, and when he wasn’t looking she dribbled some of her perfume into the cloud of steam and then, without thinking, she poured the entire bottle in. Alex, all white and bony, climbed into the tub and suddenly he sniffed the air and it nearly knocked him out.

‘Sweet Divine Jesus,’ he roared.

He hopped round the hotel room pretending he was scalded by the water or poisoned by the perfume, and Birdie said she never laughed as much in years.

‘I couldn’t get into that,’ says he ‘I’d smell like French knickers for the rest of the day.’

Get in, says she. And in he got. So don’t tell Birdie about bowls of butter!

After the bath he towelled himself and said he was going to leave. He put on his soft felt hat and threatened to walk out the door, naked but for the hat, and Birdie thought it was priceless. He still had the hat on when he sat on the side of the bed and slipped his hand underneath her dressing gown, folded himself into her, like a snake, and slithered all over the bed, as the velvet voice in the distance above them warned of snow in the Hebrides and anticyclones coming in from the Atlantic. So don’t talk to Birdie about Indonesian coffee tables or dancing elephants.