And so it was: although, of course, foreseeing those complaints and that amusement was so much more peaceful, so much more orderly and satisfying than undergoing them. This is always the case. Indeed, even in the case of our marriage perhaps the rocks and the speed and the dust that I had foreseen were exactly what I had found, though under one’s tired feet the aspect of a distant landscape changes, and becomes endowed with human exhaustion, with blisters and sweat and broken nails.

The first objective, once my consent had been thus arbitrarily obtained, was to find ourselves a suitable house to five in. Rehearsals were to begin at the end of March; the season opened in May. I took charge of the house situation myself: David was inefficient about such things, and would have lived anywhere, provided that it was up to his opinion of his professional status, whereas I cared. Unduly, excessively, I cared. I had never lived anywhere that was less than beautiful: I had been brought up in Cambridge, in one of those large and lovely houses on Madingley Road, with shutters and an overflowing garden, and dark brick covered with plants and flowers. I had been sent away to an expensive and cranky girls’ school, situated in a country house with yellow stone and garden statues. After that I had spent a year in Rome, in an apartment just behind the Piazza Navona, and from my bedroom at night I could see the fountains floodlit and that ancient arena. I had then lived for two years in a flat on Primrose Hill, which, though not of the classical and aristocratic grandeur to which I was accustomed, had a visual cachet of its own. When David and I got so aimlessly married, we had to find somewhere to live; we wanted to buy a house, to affirm, I suppose, in solid bricks and mortar the absurd nature of what we had done. I made myself unbelievably unpleasant about the purchase of it. I refused to look at anything in SW or NW as being too obvious a choice, and we could not afford plain W. I dragged David round the North and the South East, which he had never set foot in, trying to find the answer. I had no right to do this: the deposit was mine, but the mortgage was to be paid off by him. On the other hand, he did not care, and I did. So I trudged all over London, and I enjoyed it: I felt as I walked that I was learning something, even if it was only the names of the streets. I wrote to every estate agent in the professional directory, and every morning our doormat was thick with envelopes and brochures. I would lie in bed for hours reading them, then get up and spend the day in search. I was obsessed. David said I was mad, and perhaps he was right.