Their marriage seemed entirely suitable, but of course it too, like Kate’s and Stuart’s, went wrong, though not so blatantly. The most obvious embodiment of their difficulties is their eldest son, Sebastian, a child who from the first caused trouble, a hyper-active baby who never seemed to sleep. They at first assumed that his oddities sprang from an excess of intelligence, as most such parents might fondly assume, and of course they may have been right, though by now it is too late to say. As soon as he started school, they discovered he had learning as well as social difficulties: fits of intense activity would be followed by periods of intense withdrawal, he alternately bullied and was bullied, he could not sleep at night, he wet the bed. Evelyn kept calm and refused to appear to worry: Ted was far from calm, and would declaim his anxieties to anyone who would listen. At the age of eleven, they sent him to a special progressive school, but that did not turn out too well. He never worked, began to play truant as he grew older, indulged in all the anti-social activities available to a teenager in the seventies—drinking, drugs, late nights, absent nights, theft. He came home one day at the outbreak of the punk vogue with his head more or less shaved, and looked, as Kate’s children put it, a mess. Not a very edifying product of so promising a union. All the Stennetts’ friends have their own theories about what went wrong, but most agree that it must have something to do with Ted’s overbearing personality and ridiculously high expectations, combined with Evelyn’s compensatory mildness. Luckily, the second child turned out better; Vicky is a nice girl, tolerably conscientious at school, and a dab hand at such pleasant teenage pursuits as scone-baking and guitar-playing. Again, one could argue, and some do, that Ted did not feel threatened by a daughter, and therefore gave her an easier time. Or that Vicky learned early, from Sebastian’s bad example, the virtues of adaptability. Perhaps it comes to the same thing.

Ted had at least one serious affair before he took up with Kate. The woman was an actress whose husband had recently died of an overdose. She too attempted suicide several times, and finally managed it. Her death was unusually horrible: she locked herself in the bathroom of her flat in Notting Hill Gate and drank a bottle of spirits of salt. It is said that she left a vitriolic suicide note for Ted, but this may merely be gossip. Nobody much blamed Ted, because she was clearly unbalanced to begin with, which was lucky for him.

(According to Hugo, Ted spends so much of his time seducing women because he is such an ugly brute that he has to prove he can. When Hugo says this, women tend to look at one another and smile.)