I must say, however, that even if David had waited like a politician for a promising moment to approach me, he could hardly have found one. I was very unapproachable at that time, and I found the idea of going to Hereford peculiarly upsetting. I had been promised a couple of months before a very pleasant job as a newsreader and announcer by a television company which had decided, as such companies will, to have another attempt at the equality of the sexes by allowing women to announce serious events as well as forthcoming programmes. I was to have been a pioneer in this field, and I fully expected to succeed where others had failed. The job, admittedly, had been procured for me by an old friend and admirer, for whom I used to do a little sporadic fashion modelling before my marriage, but despite this string-pulling everyone admitted that I was admirably suited for such a post. I have a face of quite startling and effective gravity, a pure accident of feature, I believe, and people automatically trust what I say. The nation would have been impressed by the news as read by me. And I for my part would have enjoyed reading it: I have always had a passion for facts and a mild yearning for notoriety, and I could imagine no more happy way of combining these two interests. And after three years of childbearing and modelling maternity clothes, I felt in serious need of a good, steady, lucrative job.

I could hardly believe that marriage was going to deprive me of this, too. It had already deprived me of so many things which I had childishly overvalued: my independence, my income, my twenty-two-inch waist, my sleep, most of my friends, who had deserted on account of David’s insults, a whole string of finite things, and many more indefinite attributes, like hope and expectation. And now, just when I had got my future organized and had glimpsed, as it were, the end of solitude, I had been pushed right back to where I had started. There seemed to be no answer but stoicism, a philosophy which I find I can practice, but which I neither enjoy nor admire.