NOR, I FEEL bound to add, did her acting ever get any better. And God knows she got the practice. I was a tireless, painstaking, meticulous director. I went for nights without sleep. I trebled our usual consumption of coffee. Sometimes I had to pinch Sharon’s cheeks to keep her awake. But it seemed that she just couldn’t simulate ecstasy to save her life. She whimpered woefully; she moaned as if she were in the last stages of a difficult labour; she couldn’t manage the most perfunctory paroxysm without banging her head. She didn’t even know, although I showed her and showed her, how to lash the pillows with her hair.

‘I might just as well be married to Vanessa Redgrave,’ I complained.

But she cautioned me against complacency. ‘I could do it if you weren’t watching over me,’ she said, stifling a yawn. ‘A rehearsal is one thing, your actual live performance is another. Just wait till opening night.’

Her natural verbal indelicacy kept me on the boil. Literally. I swear steam came out of my ears.

And I thought about nothing else. I stopped going for walks. I stopped watching television. I stopped dreaming (partly because I had stopped sleeping). And I learned to value the great orderliness that a thoroughgoing obsession can bring to your life; I was troubled by no misdirected energies, I was distracted by no fugitive desires – I was whole and harmonious, concentrated upon a single purpose, as if poured through a funnel. If Mrs Flatman had suddenly slid down my chimney and ripped open her shirt and said, ‘Here, Barney – ride!’ I would have buttoned her up with unshaking fingers and sent her back the way she came.

I think I can say that at no time since I’d known her had I been a better husband to Sharon.

Dr Rowland Fitzpiers, in the meantime, little knowing what liberties were being taken with his name and person after midnight, was fast becoming a regular visitor of ours during more conventional hours. Occasionally we visited him at his place, but that invariably meant that we had to make the acquaintance of whichever new lachrymose woman he had just taken up with; whereas if he came to us he could make his own decision as to whether she was fit to be met or was best left sobbing in his kitchen. In the main he chose the latter course, which suited us, and came on his own.