My first sight of Hereford was enchanting. It was late afternoon. It had taken us a long time to get there: I had not realized how far west we were going. David drove us straight to Broad Street, and there, outside the cathedral, he stopped the car. Joe woke at the cessation of motion, but I ignored his wails, staring entranced at these huge arches, pink in the dying cloudy fight. When I had looked at it for long enough, we drove slowly back again along the street, and I took in the gargoyles on the public library, and the dark grey-green peeling defeated Corinthian pillars of the old Kemble Theatre, and the smart iron colonnades of the Green Dragon Hotel. I was enraptured: the evening colour and the broadness of the street itself had a holiday, foreign air, a charm not of the everyday but of celebration.

Then we went to see the new theatre, which was very close, just over the bridge on the other side of the river: it was too discreet for my taste, I like nothing new that is not monstrous, but its situation had a lovely watery elegance which the architecture did not quite destroy. David wanted to go in and have a look round, but I thought that it would be too cold out for the baby, so I let him go alone. I sat in the car and waited, watching the water flowing endlessly under the bridge, and when he came back I said:

“Well, all that we have to do now is to find a house.”

“You are ridiculous,” David said, touching my cheek with the hard knuckles of his hand. “You only want to come because it looks pretty today. If it had been raining, you would have started all over again about London. Wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would. You don’t understand, life is governed by accidents.”

“Yours is. Mine isn’t.”

“That’s what you think. What about the accident of meeting Wyndham Farrar at that party? But for that the thought of you would never have crossed his mind.”

“Oh yes it would. Sooner or later. There’s nobody else for the parts.”

“Megalomaniac.” I bit his knuckle, which he was still holding against me, in some defiant gesture of his own towards contact.

“Seriously, Emma, will you be all right here? You won’t complain? Will you be able to find anything to amuse you?”

“I can tell you right now,” I said as he started the engine, “that I shall complain. I shall come, and I shall complain. And I’ll also tell you that if there’s anything amusing to be found it will be me that will find it.”