‘There was great awkwardness about the tenants. In the end Bridey went down and gave them a dinner and bonfire there which wasn’t at all what they expected in return for their silver soup tureen.

‘Poor Cordelia took it hardest. She had looked forward so much to being my bridesmaid – it was a thing we used to talk about long before I came out – and of course she was a very pious child, too. At first she wouldn’t speak to me. Then on the morning of the wedding – I’d moved to Aunt Fanny Rosscommon’s the evening before; it was thought more suitable – she came bursting in before I was up, straight from Farm Street, in floods of tears, begged me not to marry, then hugged me, gave me a dear little brooch she’d bought, and said she prayed I’d always be happy. Always happy, Charles!

‘It was an awfully unpopular wedding, you know. Everyone took mummy’s side, as everyone always did – not that she got any benefit from it. All through her life mummy had all the sympathy of everyone except those she loved. They all said I’d behaved abominably to her. In fact, poor Rex found he’d married an outcast, which was exactly the opposite of all he’d wanted.

‘So you see things never looked like going right. There was a hoodoo on us from the start. But I was still nuts about Rex.

‘Funny to think of, isn’t it?

‘You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see. He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

‘Well, it’s all over now.’

It was ten years later that she said this to me in a storm in the Atlantic.

CHAPTER THREE

I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike.

It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil war. Every evening the kiosks displayed texts of doom, and, in the cafés, acquaintances greeted one half-derisively with: ‘Ha, my friend, you are better off here than at home, are you not?’ until I and several friends in circumstances like my own came seriously to believe that our country was in danger and that our duty lay there. We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes.