And wondered. Not that it did much good. That scene, downstairs just now, if I had written it, started a book, say, I’d have groaned and said, ‘Oh, lor’, not again! It’s all familiar ground. Happens all the time. Start again.’ The fact is, I suppose, that it happens to about 45 per cent of marriages, maybe 50 per cent … at least to marriages which are based primarily on sex, physical attraction. But it fades very often. As they say, it takes two to tango.

My parents, for example, adored each other from the very start. And when he died she just found no reason to live without him and followed on pretty quickly. I mean, that was real love. Lasting love, and it had been physical too … I know that: hand in hand, little kisses, a caress when they thought that perhaps we kids weren’t looking. But we often were; we felt secure because of that love, it framed us tightly. We didn’t say much to each other, but we sniggered, as kids do, covering our pleasure with vulgarity.

Elspeth was born first, I second. We were the perfectly planned little family, not too many, just enough not to strain bank balances or wreck that love. And then, of course, with bewildering surprise, we discovered that another one was on the way, more than a decade after we had all settled down snugly, complacently, together.

James. They called him James after King James the First: Dad was reading his letters at the time so James it was. He was unlike the rest of us. Elspeth and I were dark, with brown eyes, tallish; so were the parents. But James was blond, corn-blond, with wide grey eyes. Slender, small bones, almost pretty rather than actually handsome. People looked at him in the street in his pram. ‘A lovely baby!’ To everyone but Elpie (I called her Elpie) and me. I was, of course, very jealous. He became, had to become, the focus of the family. The ‘ewe lamb’, Mother said, and we had to be particularly loving towards him because he was a sort of ‘changeling child’. That didn’t make much difference to me, I might say, but Elpie was female, and slowly, after the shock had faded, became devoted to him, played with him like a doll, which he greatly resembled, discovered for the first time that he could use a pencil, or a crayon, with greater facility than we could, that perhaps he might be an artist. I suppose she really started him off, at least she encouraged him all the time, cooing and mooing over his scribbles. To the great relief of Mother; and, indeed, Father.

Father was headmaster at Dartwell, Mother wrote books. Successful books at that, historical ‘romances’ but not gushy or sickly – well researched, almost Jane Austenish. She did well, and it helped the budget.