When I asked her what was in fact happening that evening, she said that as far as she knew Wyndham had arranged for several of the company to go round to his flat to discuss the music with a man from London and that this had been fixed up several days ago. When she rang off, I tried to get hold of David at the theatre, but they told me he was rehearsing somewhere in a church hall; they gave me the telephone number, but when I got through he was unavailable, so I decided I would have to go round and confront him in person. I left my mousse and collected Flora, who had while I was on the telephone cracked three more eggs and dropped them, shells and all, into my bowl of egg white; then we set off. When we arrived at the church hall, David was in the middle of a scene, so I said I would wait for him. I took Flora with me into a little anteroom, which was full of dusty books. I looked at the titles while I was waiting: they were a wonderful nonconformist collection, ranging from The Meaning of Suffering and The Narrow Path to God to the lives of minor missionaries. As I looked at them, I heard sounds of altercation drifting through to me from the rehearsal.

“For Christ’s sake,” my husband was saying, “if you don’t tell me what it’s like, what on earth can I do about it?” and I could hear Selwyn’s faint, detached voice replying:

“My dear David, you must take it for granted that if I don’t tell you it’s wrong then it’s all right.”

“It’s not all right, it’s bloody awful,” David shouted helplessly, but clearly to no avail: Selwyn was not sufficiently interested to continue the argument, and they started to go over the scene again. When it was over, I went and stood in the doorway and tried to attract David’s attention. Finally, after a lot of angry muttering in a corner with a girl called Viola, he looked round and caught sight of me and came stamping over. I led him out into the anteroom, and instead of asking me what I was doing there he launched into a violent attack on Selwyn.

“The man oughtn’t to be allowed near a theatre,” he kept saying as he sat down on the small brown wood table and took Flora absent-mindedly into his arms, “he’s no more idea of what a director ought to do than—All we ever do is ran through the bloody thing time and time again, and he just sits there on his backside smiling like an idiot, and then if anyone complains he says, ‘Well, what are your ideas about it then?’.”