And the way he delivered this, and the whole accompanying scene, was quite tremendous. He had in them the exultant satisfaction which was the reason for his being an actor. All he wanted from life was to be able to express, like this, in public, to a mass of quiet people, what he felt himself to be. It was not merely pleasure that he had there on stage: it was a sense of clarity, a feeling of being, by words and situations not of his own making, defined and confined, so that his power and his energy could meet together in one great explanatory moment. It was not enough for David that I should try to understand him or that his friends and employers should understand him, for we subjected him by the pressure of our needs and opinions to amorphous confusion: what he wanted was nothing less than total public clarity.

And this time he had achieved it. Everyone agreed that his performance had been remarkable, and the whole production was received with rapture. At the party afterwards, which was held in Wyndham’s own flat, people called Wyndham a genius and Dave the greatest actor since I don’t know who, and Dave got horribly drunk, and so did I. It was a much less decorous party than the one after The Clandestine Marriage, as there were far fewer local people there and everyone drank too much. I hardly spoke to Wyndham, except to tell him that I had been impressed by his production, to which he said:

“How grudging you are, Emma. Of course it was good, of course you were impressed. Who do you think I am that I shouldn’t have got it right? I only did this piece because I’m the only man in England capable of putting it on.”

Everyone seemed to be in the same mood of tipsy self-aggrandizement, except for Michael Fenwick, who had grown tearful. At about two in the morning David began to quarrel with everyone, and when he started to pitch into Julian, saying things like “You can’t sit on the fence forever, why don’t you take a good look in the mirror and decide to kick that schoolboy conscience of yours down the stairs for good and all and enjoy yourself?” I decided to get out.

I walked home, alone, once more alone. I am always walking home alone, and this is one of the things I foresaw and thought I would enjoy when I first married. A kind of rage was inside me. When I reached the bridge, there was a swan drifting downstream on the wide river, and the tranquillity of the image, compared with the smoky heat that I had left, filled me with hopelessness.