Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop. Why did you marry her? you say. But why did you marry yours? These things happen to us. I wonder whether you’ll believe that during the first two or three years I had serious thoughts of killing Hilda. Of course in practice one never does these things, they’re only a kind of fantasy that one enjoys thinking about. Besides, chaps who murder their wives always get copped. However cleverly you’ve faked the alibi, they know perfectly well that it’s you who did it, and they’ll pin it on to you somehow. When a woman’s bumped off, her husband is always the first suspect—which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people really think about marriage.

One gets used to everything in time. After a year or two I stopped wanting to kill her and started wondering about her. Just wondering. For hours, sometimes, on Sunday afternoons or in the evening when I’ve come home from work, I’ve lain on my bed with all my clothes on except my shoes, wondering about women. Why they’re like that, how they get like that, whether they’re doing it on purpose. It seems to be a most frightful thing, the suddenness with which some women go to pieces after they’re married. It’s as if they were strung up to do just that one thing, and the instant they’ve done it they wither off like a flower that’s set its seed. What really gets me down is the dreary attitude towards life that it implies. If marriage was just an open swindle—if the woman trapped you into it and then turned round and said, “Now, you bastard, I’ve caught you and you’re going to work for me while I have a good time!”—I wouldn’t mind so much. But not a bit of it. They don’t want to have a good time, they merely want to slump into middle-age as quickly as possible. After the frightful battle of getting her man to the altar, the woman kind of relaxes, and all her youth, looks, energy and joy of life just vanish overnight. It was like that with Hilda. Here was this pretty, delicate girl, who’d seemed to me—and in fact when I first knew her she was—a finer type of animal than myself, and within only about three years she’d settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump. I’m not denying that I was part of the reason. But whoever she’d married it would have been much the same.

What Hilda lacks—I discovered this about a week after we were married—is any kind of joy in life, any kind of interest in things for their own sake. The idea of doing things because you enjoy them is something she can hardly understand. It was through Hilda that I first got a notion of what these decayed middle-class families are really like. The essential fact about them is that all their vitality has been drained away by lack of money. In families like that, which live on tiny pensions and annuities—that’s to say on incomes which never get bigger and generally get smaller—there’s more sense of poverty, more crust-wiping and looking twice at sixpence, than you’d find in any farm-labourer’s family, let alone a family like mine. Hilda’s often told me that almost the first thing she can remember is a ghastly feeling that there was never enough money for anything. Of course, in that kind of family, the lack of money is always at its worst when the kids are at the school-age. Consequently they grow up, especially the girls, with a fixed idea not only that one always is hard-up but that it’s one’s duty to be miserable about it.