He had been looking to make such a statement. He was twenty-three and a virgin. The capacity to love lay heavy inside him and he wished to discharge it full square, with maximum force, at the person with whom he would share his life. When she said goodbye to him that evening he smelled the gunpowder.

She was studying art, the daughter of a Suffolk lawyer. He was a third-year Classicist, the only son of a professional historian – whose books, concerned with a seven-year period in the eighteenth century, he had never managed to finish.

Wavery was too inexperienced to know how we tell people we love them before we mean it, to create a space for love to move in. He recognised the distance between himself and the pretty art student. But with the confidence of a young Latin scholar he believed he might bridge it. When he realised he could not, he respected the distance – until, finally, it became a matter of acceptance.

At Easter they met in London. Penny was working in a department store on Knightsbridge, behind the ceramics counter. He was studying for finals. One lunch hour they took a picnic to Hyde Park. The pollen was bad that year and she spent most of the lunch sneezing.

She wore a new linen dress, white with narrow shoulder straps, but was unable properly to flaunt it. She sneezed again and held out her hand for support. He gripped it, saying how sad she couldn’t see the perfect day around them.

All afternoon his fingers felt the absence of her hand.

When he returned to his aunt’s house in Holland Park he wrote to Penny, proposing. He wrote out the letter four times before he was satisfied with it, after which he walked up Ladbroke Grove. At the pillar box, he was arrested by doubts. He paced up and down for half an hour, unable to decide. After half an hour, he placed the envelope in the box. He was on the point of snatching it out when he felt rain on the back of his hand. Rather than allow the rain to blur the ink in which he had written her name and address, he posted the letter.

They were married in August. On returning from honeymoon in the Ardèche, Wavery learned he had been accepted into the Foreign Service. Six months later they arrived in Lisbon, occupying an apartment on the lower half of a palace in Lapa. The apartment’s finest feature was a broad, blue-tiled terrace with a matchless view over the Tagus. On this terrace Penny learned to paint in oils.

Their happiness was conventional. Both were delighted to fall into a mould. They were perpetuating a way of life and a class. They saw nothing wrong in their background, beyond the jibes young people make. If their love was not as passionate as love could be, this was because it had never been put to the test. Neither one had been denied the other. Together they were accepted by society. And they were young.