After thirteen months we had Flora. I was furious: she was David’s responsibility, we owed her to his carelessness, I was appalled by the filthy mess of pregnancy and birth, and for the last two months before she was born I could hardly speak to him for misery. But somehow, after she was born, and this again is a common story, I am proud of its commonness, things improved out of all recognition. We changed. I can see now that it is as simple as that: we changed. I was devoted to Flora, entirely against my expectations, so that every time I saw her I was filled with delighted and amazed relief. What I had dreaded as the blight of my life turned out to be one of its greatest joys. David, too, reacted overwhelmingly strongly towards the child, and in the shock of our mutual surprise at this state of affairs we fell once more into each other’s arms. And so, for the next three years, we drifted on, in a quibbling, satisfactory kind of way, with a fairly normal distribution of happiness and woe; the only thing that never returned was my first rocky terror. The remarkable fact is that we were entirely faithful to each other. I do not understand why David was faithful to me: he says that he cannot count the girls that he had slept with before our marriage, and I believe him, though I am not as impressed by such statements as I used to be. So the reasons why he did not compensate for my periodic extreme unpleasantness remain hidden. The reason why I did not was, to me, quite clear: I never had time, and I never met anyone I liked. As simple as that. Even at the worst, I liked David. And although I did not see that I owed him very much, I certainly did not owe anyone else more.
And that is how things were before we went to Hereford.