Stephen bought a house on Grosvenor Square and had the interior luxuriously remodelled. He and Ginie discovered a shared love of beautiful things, and had a wonderful time shopping for them. Some of the decoration was done in a spirit of fantasy by society interior designer, the Marchese Malacrida, including an eighteenth century Venetian-style bedroom for Ginie, complete with crystal chandeliers and gilded panelling. There was also a columned courtyard behind the house that looked like a Roman atrium.

They bought their first puppy: a Great Dane with blue eyes, oversized ears and fur like satin. They named him Caesar and he followed Ginie everywhere. But life wasn’t all sweetness. Stephen was prone to black, deeply introspective moods, in which nothing she could say was any use. All she could do was give him space and wait for it to pass. He slept badly, flailing around and uttering disjointed words to ghosts of the war. Some mornings, he woke up screaming. Ginie would hold him until he was himself again.

‘It’s alright, darling,’ she always said. ‘I’m here.’

He was breathless and sweating. At first, he could only stare at her, as though he didn’t know where he was. After a few minutes, recognition would creep back into his eyes.

‘It’s you,’ he would say, tears running down his cheeks. ‘It’s you. It’s you. I’m so glad you’re here.’ He never told her what his dreams were about, despite her appeals. What could he have seen that was so terrible that he couldn’t share it with anyone, not even her?

Ginie and Stephen received a small number of invitations, but London’s best-known hostesses – women like Lady Colefax, Margot Asquith and Lady Diana Cooper – would not open their doors to them. Ginie couldn’t be presented at court because she was a divorcee. What she saw as the brilliance and sophistication of London society eluded her. It hurt bitterly, but there was little she could do. She was up against a closed system of moral judgement that rendered her, a divorced foreigner, an ‘undesirable’.

It didn’t help that Stephen hated staying out late at night. His idea of a perfect evening was dinner at home as a couple, listening to records or reading. He was a voracious reader; sometimes poetry, sometimes fiction, sometimes the Greek and Latin classics. For the most part, he read history: Gibbon, Macaulay, Froude, Prescott, Johnson, Boswell, Pepys, and Carlyle. His grasp of the subject made Ginie conscious of the gaps in her own education. He enjoyed the theatre, the opera and the ballet. They often went to performances, stopping at the Savoy or Wheeler’s afterwards for supper.