BY THE next morning I had managed to convert the house to something nearer the kind of house I might live in. I did this by covering all ledges and surfaces with my carefully accumulated objects and scraps of tattered and embroidered cloth. I could see Pascal getting sadder and sadder as the transformation took place: she really hated my style, that pale shiny table was just about her measure, and she cried out in protest as it disappeared under a green fringed velour cloth that had belonged to my grandmother. What a strange situation the domestic situation is that it should oblige one to live with other people with whom one has no sense of connection of any land. Pascal and I disagreed, I am sure, on every possible point, and yet we lived together, ate together, shared the same bath and the same life. I was a little surprised that she agreed to go to Hereford with us at all. I suppose that it was her dotty devotion to David that kept her with us. He used to tease her, and hold her hand, and comment on her clothes: he had his uses. And daily, nightly, Pascal and I would exchange remarks, for months on end, and yet for all that I knew about her she might have been a total stranger. This, I am sure, was a direct result of our relationship, of the economic nexus that bound us. I knew more about someone that I met for ten minutes at a party than I knew after months about Pascal. Not that I ignored her because I paid her; on the contrary, the fact that I was paying her afflicted me so much that I did not dare to intrude, by a look or a word, upon her privacy. Perhaps she did not care, but I cared. I treated her with such infinite respect that I did not criticize a single one of her actions, nor go so far as to open her bedroom door to see what she had done to the room, for the whole of the time she was with us. The result of all this circumspection was that I did not know what she was like, and I set great store by knowing what people are like.

While I was unpacking I found that one of my Liverpool ware teapots was broken. I had two, both with delicate grey-and-white pastoral scenes of cows and trees; and one of them, as I unpacked, was already in pieces. I had packed it too near the edge of the tea chest; it must have been knocked in transit. It was my own fault, and I had never broken anything in removal before. I was white with fury for an hour after. It is frightening how little I can bear any slipping off of my own perfection.