‘Yes, come to the bookshop,’ I put in, just in case anybody cared what I thought.

I was pleased that we had run into Rowland while we were out shopping. It meant that Sharon was looking her very best. Shopping – proper social expeditionary shopping, not buying groceries – was Sharon’s passion and she dressed for it with a wild extravagance as if it were a special occasion and not something that she in fact did every day. It was and always had been a compulsion with her. In the early days of our courtship we had loved and wooed each other exclusively in or between department stores; while other couples grew to mutual understanding by going to midday concerts and walking arm in arm together through the National Gallery – systematically, some of them, comparing styles and schools and sympathies – Sharon and I were pounding the pavements of Regent Street, matching the tea trays and the oven gloves we would need when we were married. We bought and bought and bought, and when we ran out of money, we took back. There wasn’t a memory or an association stored up for later life that wasn’t charged with the history of our past transactions. Where other wives would remind their husbands of the time they fed the swans and strolled in sunlight through the Borghese Gardens, Sharon would run from the kitchen on a sudden thought and throw her arms round my neck and show me a potato peeler: ‘Do you remember, darling? The January sales, 1964! Selfridges!’ I would have preferred it, in retrospect, if we had found the Cathedral on our honeymoon in Chartres instead of boots for Sharon, but I had followed her around obediently then for the same reason I followed her obediently now – because I liked to be seen with her. Especially I liked other men to see me with her.

And this was more the case than ever just lately, when skirts were getting shorter by the second and Sharon’s skirts, as I am sure I have already mentioned, were always just that fraction in advance of fashion. It gave me enormous pleasure to discover that some man, some other woman’s husband, was following us through cosmetics and haberdashery and bedding, at an even distance; it was a source of considerable husbandly pride to me that little gasps of admiration and astonishment could be heard behind us when we travelled on the escalators. I surprised Sharon by the amount of shopping I was prepared to do with her these days, and the frequency with which the very things I wanted to look at turned out to be situated on the top floor. She couldn’t understand, either, why even when she was tired I forbade her to take the lift but insisted that she rode the escalator.