She flushed and said in a thick sullen voice, ‘You should have thought of that before you were unfaithful to me with that woman.’

‘That,’ he said, ‘was three years ago, three years. I don’t want to provoke you and we’ve been into this enough times, but you know very well why I was unfaithful to you. I’m only thirty-five, I’m still young. I couldn’t stand being permitted marital relations, pawing you about, if you like that better, about six times a year. Do I have to go over it all again?’

‘Not on my account. It won’t make any difference to me what excuses you make.’ The smoke in the tiny room made her cough and, opening the window, she inhaled the damp cold air. ‘You asked me,’ she said, turning round, ‘why we have to go on living together. I’ll tell you why. Because you married me. I’ve got a right to you and I’ll never divorce you. You’ve got me till death parts us. Till death, James. Right?’

He didn’t answer. An icy blast had come into the room when she had opened the window, and he felt in his pocket. ‘If you’re going to stay in here till dinner,’ he said, ‘you’ll want the gas fire on. Have you got any five pence pieces? I haven’t, unless I can get some change.’

‘Oh, you’ll get some all right. In the bar. And just for your information, I haven’t brought any money with me. That’s your privilege.’

When he had left her alone, she sat in the cold room for some minutes, staring at the brick wall. Till death parts us, she had told him, and she meant it. She would never leave him and he must never be allowed to leave her, but she hoped he would die. It wasn’t her fault she was frigid. She had always supposed he understood. She had supposed her good looks and her capacity as housewife and hostess compensated for a revulsion she couldn’t help. And it wasn’t just against him, but against all men, any man. He had seemed to accept it and to be happy with her. In her sexless way, she had loved him. And then, when he had seemed happier and more at ease than at any time in their marriage, when he had ceased to make those painful demands and had become so sweet to her, so generous with presents, he had suddenly and without shame confessed it. She wouldn’t mind, he had told her, he knew that. She wouldn’t resent his finding elsewhere what she so evidently disliked giving him. While he provided for her and spent nearly all his leisure with her and respected her as his wife, she should be relieved, disliking sex as she did, that he had found someone else.

He had said it was the pent-up energy caused by her repressions that made her fly at him, beat at him with her hands, scream at him words he didn’t know she knew. To her dying day she would remember his astonishment. He had genuinely thought she wouldn’t mind. And it had taken weeks of nagging and screaming and threats to make him agree to give Frances up. She had driven him out of her bedroom and settled into the bitter unremitting vendetta she would keep up till death parted them. Even now, he didn’t understand how agonisingly he had hurt her. But there were no more women and he had begun to drink. He was drinking now, she thought, and by nine o’clock he would be stretched out, dead drunk on that bed separated by only eighteen inches from her own.