She accepted his proposal, made formally and accompanied by a huge bunch of red roses. ‘Of course I’ll marry you. My life has been yours ever since you saved it. I’ve always felt I belonged to you.’

They were married very quietly. Lydia didn’t like the idea of a big wedding. He and she were ideally suited, they had so many tastes in common: a love of quietness and order, rather old-fashioned ways, steadiness, regular habits. They had the same aims: a house in a north-western suburb, two children. But for the time being she would continue to work.

It amazed and delighted him that she managed to keep the new house so well, to provide him every morning with freshly laundered underwear and shirt, every night with a perfectly cooked meal. He hadn’t been so well looked after since he had left his mother’s house. That, he thought, was how a woman should be, unobtrusively efficient, gentle yet expert, feminine and sweet, yet accomplished. The house was run as smoothly as if a couple of silent invisible maids were at work in it all day.

To perform these chores, she got up each morning at six. He suggested they get a cleaner but she wouldn’t have one, resisting him without defiance but in a way which was bound to appeal to him.

‘I couldn’t bear to let any other woman look after your things, darling.’

She was quite perfect.

They went to work together, lunched together, came home together, ate together, watched television or listened to music or read in companionable silence together, slept together. At the weekends they were together all the time. Both had decided their home must be fully equipped with washers and driers and freezers and mixers and cleaners and polishers, beautifully furnished with the brand-new or the extreme antique, so on Saturdays they shopped together.

He adored it. This was what marriage should be, this was what the church service meant – one flesh, forsaking all other. He had, in fact, forsaken most of the people he had once known. Lydia wasn’t a very sociable woman and had no women friends. He asked her why not.

‘Women,’ she said, ‘only want to know other women to gossip about their men. I haven’t any complaints against my man, darling.’

His own friends seemed a little over-awed by the grandeur and pomp with which she entertained them, by the finger bowls and fruit knives. Or perhaps they were put off by her long silences and the way she kept glancing at her watch. It was only natural, of course, that she didn’t want people staying half the night. She wanted to be alone with him. They might have understood that and made allowances. His clients and their wives weren’t over-awed. They must have been gratified. Where else, in a private house with no help, would they have been given a five-course dinner, exquisitely cooked and served? Naturally, Lydia had to spend all the pre-dinner time in the kitchen and, naturally too, she was exhausted after dinner, a little snappy with the man who spilt coffee on their new carpet, and the other one, a pleasant if tactless stockbroker, who tried to persuade him to go away on a stag, golfing weekend.