Her parents are dining with them this evening, and everything will be perfect. Her servants, her beautiful porcelain crockery and her choice of menu will all stand up to her mother’s scrutiny.

She has spent the day, as she spends most of her days now, planning dinner with the cook in the morning after breakfast, encouraging the maid to tidy the rooms with a little more effort and choosing flowers for the vases in the drawing room. Delphiniums today, cut from the garden. She did make a brief excursion to Hartleys to find some handkerchiefs for Ralph. She also took a look at the display of summer shoes but decided that she did not like any of them enough to buy.

She read the Daily Express this afternoon. Jimmy Cartwright had written a report on some trades’ union meeting in Glasgow. She read it several times over, remembering the last time she saw Jimmy, clutching his typewriter, but paying little attention to the piece itself, which did not interest her at all.

There have been no more disagreeable insinuations about Ralph in the newspapers since the spring. The fuss surrounding his connections with a Soho nightclub has, as her father predicted, long since died away.

Her own pretensions to a career have also died. The notebooks and pencils that she had collected from her desk at the Kensington Gazette lie untouched in the bureau in Ralph’s study. Occasionally, she imagines she might pick up a pen and write something and send it to a magazine or a newspaper, to see whether it might be published. But she knows this is a fanciful notion – and besides, there is so much else to do, now she is married. She wonders how she ever had time for a job. Her old schoolfriend, Charlotte Gibbs, is trying to encourage her to sit on a charity committee, which will also occupy her enormously. And she will travel to the constituency with Ralph next week.

She pulls open a drawer, hunting for a pot of lipstick in a particular shade. A short hairstyle seems to require a touch more make-up – and she no longer has to listen to her mother’s disapproval about painting herself like a harlot if she doesn’t wish to. She is a married woman now, not a child at home.

They married quickly. At Easter, on a squally April morning, soon after that terrible business with the Angel. And Selfridges. There was no point in waiting, her father had said, once she had decided that marrying Ralph would be alright after all.

It is alright, being married. She is quite content. Quite content. She reminds herself of this every evening just before Ralph returns so that she is sure to greet him with a smile.

The sun is warm. Real June weather, and a glorious day. Perhaps they will have cocktails in the garden before dinner. People do that sort of thing in Mayfair.