Ted Stennett is not at first sight an attractive man. He is only just of medium height, thick-set, and almost bald; his head is round and shining and ominous, a threatening purposeful head. An aggressive, determined man, slightly manic, a great talker when in action, an enthusiast. He is also, which tends to annoy his friends, a man of considerable culture, who reads heavy Victorian novels for light relief, teaches himself German in order to be able to read papers without translations, attends the theatre and art galleries and parties when he has time. A competitive, ambitious, addictive man, who has harnessed his nature to a useful end, though it breaks out destructively every now and then, particularly with women, for Ted, as well as all the rest of it, is a womaniser, if that old-fashioned term is still current. Like Stuart, he is susceptible, but, unlike Stuart, he clearly offers performance as well as appreciation. Hugo finds Ted’s success with women astonishing, for he cannot believe that Ted is considerate in bed, or out of it for that matter, but clearly, he says to himself, he does not understand women, not even Kate, whom he knows quite well. And he concedes that Kate and Ted, in their heyday, were a good couple, well matched.

Evelyn Stennett is a lovely woman. Everyone agrees that she is a lovely woman. That seems her lot in life. Unlike Kate, she is gentle, mild of manner and of feature, self-effacing. She is intelligent, well bred, well educated, serious, well informed. People who meet her for the first time at a social gathering tend to treat her politely as extrovert Ted’s quiet and dependable wife, and imagine that she must be a great support to him. There is a little truth in this picture, but not much. She also, like Kate, works, and works longer hours; when her youngest child started primary school, she started fulltime as a social worker. She is well organised, and runs an orderly home. Kate is well organised, and runs a disorderly home. Evelyn does not make much of her own achievements; she was brought up to believe such things possible, and has made them so, as her mother did before her.

When Ted first met her, out in Gambia, she seemed to represent an unfamiliar world, and a world that he wanted; a world of good connections, security, style. Her father is a surgeon, her mother recently retired from the headship of a large and well-known London school. The Morton girls (there were three of them) were brought up to stand on their own feet, and given a good education to assist them to this end. Evelyn, in those early days, seemed to Ted to know everybody, and to be known to everybody; everybody who was anybody knew the Morton girls, at least in the academic and medical worlds, which were the worlds Ted intended to besiege. In marrying Evelyn, Ted found himself not quite by accident in a charmed circle, and one moreover which included him with the best of grace, for the Mortons were too high-principled to be snobbish, and well placed to appreciate his exceptional gifts. It took him some time to appreciate their limitations, and to become impatient with them. Evelyn could have warned him, but did not wish to. At the beginning, out in Gambia, they didn’t think of such things. They were young; they fell in love. Ted rescued Evelyn from a period of terrifying loneliness; she had miscalculated her own strength, in going out alone straight from college to Africa, but was too proud to admit it. Ted arrived like salvation, and brought her honorably home only three months ahead of the end of her sentence.