This must have been the longest unbroken stint in one theatre that Camilla and I had put in since we’d known each other. As I think I’ve said, we were great walkers out of plays. And we didn’t go about it in a slap-dash fashion either. Already this season we had succeeded in not sitting through a Christopher Hampton, an Edward Bond, a Howard Brenton, and two David Storeys – all at the Royai Court; a Trevor Griffiths at the National (we knew better than to bother even taking our seats for Equus); a Pinter at the Aldwych (directed by Peter Hall – a double reason for not staying); to say nothing of five fringe David Edgars, and of course every Alan Ayckbourn on in town. Peter Brook eluded us in London – he might have been experimenting with silences – but Camilla and I had always found his productions well worth travelling some distance not to sit through, and we finally caught up with one we could walk out on in Paris.

The year – as any ordinarily educated theatre-goer will by now have recognized – was 1973, and since Camilla and I were still married it will be evident that I hadn’t acted in haste on the strength of the realization that had dawned on me during my first morning as Camilla’s husband. I had neither left her (which would not have been much to the point, anyway) nor encouraged her to leave me. I wasn’t, I am pleased to affirm, a totally unfeeling brute. Just because a loving wife could not, by definition, provide me with the form of gratification I most craved – namely, the sensation of being with a wife who wasn’t loving – that was no reason to discard all the other pleasures and obligations which marriage exists to confer. I am quite certain that Camilla was making identical accommodations to practicalities in regard to me. If I wasn’t an unfeeling brute, neither was I a complete fool. I had never for one moment supposed that she had not found herself, as Mrs Fugleman, in a position every bit as false as mine. Flooding me with wifely irradiance each morning, and making herself look smaller than she was, so as not to frighten me (or herself) with superfluity, was not her idea of a good time either. But like me she made the best of it.