“Don’t be ridiculous, woman.” He was watching, I could see, the mirrored image of his own reactions. “You’ll just have to live here, that’s all. You’ll just have to learn to put up with what other people would give anything to have. I can tell you that there will be a lot of people here who’d give anything to be able to afford to live in a nice house like this for the season. You’re spoiled, that’s what’s the matter with you.”

“Well, if I am, that doesn’t make it any the simpler, does it? I can’t tell you what that wardrobe does to me. It depresses me.”

“You just don’t like anything that’s less than a hundred years old. You should be dead and buried. That wardrobe, that’s modern life. You’ll just have to ram it down your gullet and swallow hard.”

As usual, the more grandiose of his statements managed to silence me. For it was modern life, that wardrobe, and I knew as I stared at it that I was going to do my best to swallow it; but I protested, nevertheless.

“It’s not modern life at all,” I said. “It’s just hideous hybrid nothingness.”

“The only conclusion to draw then,” said David, who is far from stupid, “is that we live in a hideous hybrid age, and I know you won’t have that, will you? You swallow down your nasty sweet martini, you smoke your cigarettes, you watch the filthy television, you speak up in praise of posters and office blocks and speedboats and jazz, you spend a bleeding fortune on lacquer to keep your hair in ridiculous shapes and then your stomach won’t accept an ordinary useful inoffensive wardrobe. You can’t just have what you want and throw out the rest, you know.”

“I suppose I’ll get used to it,” I said. “If it exists, it exists, and it might as well exist in my bedroom as anyone else’s.”

“That’s the spirit,” said David, leaving the mirror and coming over to sit by me on the bed. “I knew you’d see it that way. I don’t see it that way myself, but I knew that you would.”

“You think you can talk me round, do you?”

“Why not? I only say to you what I know you would be thinking in half an hour’s time. I just try to hurry up the misery, that’s all. Now give me a nice kiss.”

“What for?”

“For being so understanding about that wardrobe. I’ll tell you something: you did marry me for my taste in furniture after all, you know. You married me because my taste was so bloody awful, and you thought it would be good for you to be up against it every day of your life. Isn’t that true?”

“Of course it’s true.”