And yet despite the sections and subsections, the anatomy of our marriage, there remained something that could not be directed, for it was still alive; and it was this live thing that made it impossible for us to part. Indeed, the idea of parting never crossed our minds. It was never anything but a question of his staying or my going. This living thing, whatever it was, kept us still intertwined, so that at each move I knocked against him, each breath of his swelled against my own ribcage. We were not separate at this point: we were part of the same thing still. I like things to be orderly and distinct, I do not much like the mess of union, it made me angry that his ash should be in my ashtrays, that his movements should be my movements; and yet that was how it was. He said that he would go to Hereford, and I, self-willed, distinct, determined Emma Evans, I said that I would go, too.

When I think of that name he gave me, Emma Evans, I realize that I should have seen far earlier what a mess it was all going to turn out: a ludicrous name, a comic name, for a woman whose trademark had always been a certain bleak distance from such suggestions. I should have realized earlier. For someone of my intelligence, I have a good deal of ignorance to atone for.

I met David Evans four years ago in the Television Centre at White City. He was twenty-five at the time; I was twenty-two. We met by accident, in a lift, going up to the fifth floor. I was going to visit a friend of mine, with whom I was having lunch—the same friend Bob who later got me this other job which I had to turn down, though that was on another channel. I don’t know where he was going. We did not speak, naturally, but we stared at each other and I wondered if I had seen him somewhere before. It was not a decisive meeting.

Our second meeting, however, was decisive. This took place on the last train from Charing Cross to Tonbridge, a few days after our preliminary encounter, and after I had seen him in the play on which he had clearly been working at the time when he had got into that lift. We were both in the same compartment; it was one of those sealed suburban compartments, with no corridor. I had got in first; he, walking along the platform and seeing me, had got in because I was there. I am glad of that: I believe in the significance of chronology. We eyed each other as the train drew out. We had not reached London Bridge before David said in his pronounced Welsh voice, which he uses to be charming, “Haven’t we met somewhere before?”