The way things happened, you had to take everything for granted, Catherine felt, in her withdrawn moments. Like being Mrs Standish, like sables round your throat, like the clothes that more than fulfilled the primary function of being clothes, like the house with all the pretty things she had bought at Liberty’s. All these were too far removed from what used to be the possible that you couldn’t hope to adjust the mechanism of your mind. You had to import a brand-new mechanism to cope with the new person, the other values. And as she was both sufficiently intelligent and sufficiently naïve, she did this successfully. Later when she had children of her own, they were often surprised at her lack of surprise. If it were suddenly announced that the moon had landed on the earth, it would have been part of her legitimate reaction to say: well, now, let’s put on coats, and go out and see, and as we might have to climb, perhaps we ought to take sticks. She was never surprised, she was seldom bored. It was fun, in a world of endless possibility, created when she married Willy.

Most delightful was the house, which was so very different from the concept of house, from what her father, for instance, would have considered necessary for the process of living. If she ever felt herself a traitor to a once professed creed, it was easy enough to argue that she did so much enjoy herself. And after all, who was this girl nosing into books she didn’t understand, building an intellectual shell that she lived in with anxiety? She was a more shadowy, bogus version of the delightful Mrs Standish, who sat at home in her drawing-room, and smiled to herself when she heard the chiming of her French gilt clock. This had a golden tone. She surrounded herself with yellow gold, the brocaded curtains from Liberty’s, and the flowered wallpaper, the neat, small, sprigged flowers which were just the thing at the moment. She was all day long going up and down stairs, just for the pleasure of going up and down stairs, for enjoying possession of her territory. Or she would run to the window, call to the maids in her excitement, to watch soldiers passing in the street. The scarlet, and the brass, and the brassy music moved into the receptive landscape of her mind, with all the other fascinating details recently collected there. And the moisture of excitement stood round the edges of her face, on her forehead, at the roots of her now more controlled hair.

She was quite happy by herself in the house. Willy stayed away a lot. He was painting. He had, of course, the studio in Chelsea. Sometimes she went down, and they had a picnic, and she held her head on one side and made the appropriate remarks for Willy’s paintings. But it was still a game, and he knew it was, and he liked to encourage her to play a game. He came up behind her and kissed her on the neck, between the shoulder and the neck, which closed on his face in protest and in pleasure. They were very much in love. Physically in love. They broke off frequently in the middle of a conversation, because of the greater importance of a private obsession. They sat and looked at each other, and you could see the bones of their faces, as if the flesh had shrunk.