After our marriage David and I got ground down. Until this time we had both deliberately kept each other at a breathless distance, with an instinct for sexual self-preservation of which we were not wholly aware. Once we were married, distance was no longer possible. Our passion for each other had been rooted, at the beginning, in our foreignness: in him, his flashy, commercial, charming, drunken, photogenic selfishness, and in me, my cool, professional, aesthetic, privileged, photogenic eccentricity. And in bed and at breakfast selfishness is not charming and eccentricity is not even eccentric. It is a common story, I know. Passion choked by domesticity. Or one might say that we married in haste and repented in leisure. Certainly we both were a catalogue of the vices in wife and husband that should act as a permanent deterrent from matrimony. And yet even in that worst patch I never managed to be sorry that we did it: it was a good gamble we made, each thinking that the other possessed the wildness to which we wished to chain ourselves forever, each thinking that we would by that one ceremony strap ourselves to the dusty wheels of the other’s headlong career, each thinking that we had committed ourselves to unfamiliarity, so that we would be forever voluntarily exiled, with no pernicious hope of retreat, from that lush Cambridge garden and that sour four-room cottage in North Wales.

And we did achieve an exile, of course. We could hardly have achieved less. But in gaining so much for ourselves I sometimes felt that we had lost each other. It was not foreignness that began to weigh on my spirits, but familiarity. The details of our life together repelled me: I hated the way David would throw his clothes all over my neatly folded garments when he undressed for bed. I loathed the way that the bed itself would be strewn all over the room in the morning. When I sleep alone, I hardly disturb the sheets. And I know that my way of life infuriated him, too: he could never understand why it was necessary for me to take so long to do my hair, trying out new arrangements for an hour or more before I would go out for the evening, and after a few months he was no longer amused by my habit of wearing eccentric articles picked up in jumble sales and by my desire to fill the house with what he called Victorian junk.