Well, why not? Why not rock their marriage before it had even begun? A letter. A letter to be concealed in, say, that blue-and-white ginger jar. She sat down to write. Dear Patricia – what a stupid way to begin, the way you had to begin a letter even to your enemy.

Dear Patricia: I don’t know what Maurice has told you about me, but we have been living here as lovers ever since he arrived. To be more explicit, I mean we have made love, have slept together. Maurice is incapable of being faithful to anyone. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why, if he didn’t want me, he didn’t stay in a hotel. That’s all. Yours – and she signed her name and felt a little better, well enough and steady enough to take a bath and get herself some lunch.

Six tea chests and a trunk arrived on the following day. The chests smelled of tea and had drifts of tea leaves lying in the bottom of them. The trunk was made of silver-coloured metal and had clasps of gold-coloured metal. It was rather a beautiful object, five feet long, three feet high, two feet wide, and the lid fitted so securely it seemed a hermetic sealing.

Maurice began to pack at two o’clock. He used tissue paper and newspapers. He filled the tea chests with kitchen equipment and cups and plates and cutlery, with books, with those clothes of his he had left behind him a year before. Studiously, and with a certain grim pleasure, he avoided everything Betsy might have insisted was hers – the poor cheap things, the stainless steel spoons and forks, the Woolworth pottery, the awful coloured sheets, red and orange and olive, that he had always loathed. He and Patricia would sleep in white linen.

Betsy didn’t help him. She watched, chain-smoking. He nailed the lids on the chests and on each lid he wrote in white paint his address in Australia. But he didn’t paint in the letters of his own name. He painted Patricia’s. This wasn’t done to needle Betsy but he was glad to see it was needling her.

He hadn’t come back to the flat till one that morning, and of course he didn’t have a key. Betsy had refused to let him in, had left him down there in the street, and he had to sit in the car he’d hired till seven. She looked as if she hadn’t slept either. Miss Patricia Gordon, he wrote, painting fast and skilfully.

‘Don’t forget your ginger jar,’ said Betsy. ‘I don’t want it.’

‘That’s for the trunk.’ Miss Patricia Gordon, 23 Burwood Park Avenue, Kew, Victoria, Australia 3101. ‘All the pretty things are going in the trunk. I intend it as a special present for Patricia.’

The Lowry came down and was carefully padded and wrapped. He wrapped the onyx ashtray and the pen jar, the alabaster bowl, the bronze paperknife, the tiny Chinese cups, the tall hock glasses. The china figurine, alas . . . he opened the lid of the trunk.