“Wyndham sent me the script for Edmund Carpenter’s new play,” he said.

I listened to this statement as the tiny, mousy, pathetic scrap of child latched itself onto my breast: I must, I said to myself, keep calm, or the child will get wind and I will be feeding him all night.

“Oh yes,” I said after a while. “Is it a good play?”

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s a very good part.”

“Which part?”

“Now look here, Emma,” said David, and at his tone I bent my face all the more intently away from him and towards my baby, “I don’t honestly see what I can do about it. We’ve got to go, and that’s that. It’s only for seven months, and you’ll bloody well have to lump it. I can’t afford not to go.”

“What do you mean,” I said, “you can’t afford not to go? You told me last week you were rolling in money. And I thought you were signed up to do that television next month.”

“I can do that as well,” said David.

“Well, in that case,” I said, hearing with alarm in my own voice a tone threatening imminent disaster, “you’ll be able to afford anything you want, won’t you?”

“It isn’t a question of money,” he said, and out rolled those classic, inevitable words once more, “it’s a question of my career.”

“Really, Dave my darling,” I said with the unnatural evenness demanded by the quiet, even sucking, “I think your career is perfectly all right without your hopping off to the wilds of the country to some artsy festival where they’ll probably pay you fifteen pounds a week and expect you to be grateful.”

“Wyndham mentioned a salary,” he said with that smug look that had been possessing him lately.

“And what about me?” I said querulously, knowing that I had lost as soon as I realized that the economics of the scheme had met with David’s approval and would therefore certainly meet with mine. “What about me? I’d got everything so tidily arranged, I can’t just mess it all up again to go trailing all over England after you, can I?”

“Of course you can,” he said. “Anyway, it isn’t a question of all over England, it would be Hereford, for seven months. We can let this place and take a house there, and you’ll have Pascal to help you with everything. It would be very good for you and the babies. I wouldn’t ask you to go just anywhere, but the country’s good for you.”