“Do you think the ceiling will fall in on us?” I asked. Our anger had disappeared entirely: we were holding hands, joined in admiration for this extraordinary feat.

“Perhaps we ought to move the bed,” he said.

So we got out and pushed the bed to another part of the room; the noise of it woke Flora, who had to be pacified, and Joe, who had to be fed. By the time I had got Joe off to sleep again, David and I were in a very gay mood and I had consented to go and look at Hereford, to read his script and to believe in his necessities. He in turn had consented to be understanding about having his hand pushed off my thighs, in view of Joseph and my weariness.

When I finally got back into bed and arranged myself once more, I found that the sheets were full of plaster; I lay awake some time, feeling these small and gritty particles rubbing against my legs. I thought of the princess and the pea, and that old myth about the sensitive skins of the world’s aristocrats. I was certainly one of those, to judge by the irritation that those lumps of ceiling caused me. David, on the other hand, slept. Our marriage bed, pushed out into the middle of the room, stranded there far from the harbour of the walls and filled with grit, with David and myself far from unhappy in it. That perhaps was the beginning of the Garrick year, for me.

2

I SUPPOSE that some people may find it surprising that at this point we did not separate. Things being as they were, and I have tried to indicate how they were, why did I not stay in London at our house in Islington, which meant so much to me, and let David go off to Hereford by himself?

The reasons, some sordid and some not so sordid, are so clear to me that I can hardly forbear to tabulate them in sections and subsections. Amongst the sordid lay my fear of being left alone with the children and the nanny; my fear of public defeat; my fear of loneliness; my fear of the compensations for loneliness. And amongst the not so sordid lay each of these reasons, but seen in a milder and forgiving light. I did not want to separate the children from their father; I did not want anyone to criticize David for leaving me; I did not want David to be alone in Hereford, not only because I knew that if he went without me he would never come back, but also because I knew that he, too, would be lonely.