Bob continued to have his own particular splendour, survived the War with gallantry, sat on committees with dignity, never lost his increasingly old-fashioned concern with good form. He became a bit of a philanderer in a gentlemanly kind of way, was to be seen escorting charming Society ladies here or there, to the opera or to the races, while Olivia’s interests came to be more and more in the country. As the years went on she became rather solid in appearance and her husband often wished she would do something about her clothes; nevertheless even when she was quite old young people who were told she had once been beautiful would say, ‘But she still is.’ She was fond of her husband. The disillusionment consequent upon unfulfilled expectations faded, along with the desolation of Lionel’s loss. The sound of Bob’s car, arriving back from London, his step in the hall, his voice calling for her, never failed to lighten her heart, make her smile, ask the news; she was a deeply domesticated wife. If their four children were each in their different ways more open to adventure, more developed in sympathy and imagination, more likely to have – as Olivia had once thought of Lionel ‘nothing they were not prepared to consider’, than might have been expected from the offspring of such a conventional father – that was because Olivia had, quite consciously and with the unspoken connivance of Mrs Stephens, dedicated them to the memory of the man whose character she considered to have been, if not quite perfect, even so more or less what God must have had in mind when it first occurred to him to make Man. In one of his letters Lionel had written to her, ‘You wrote something about me which was not true, something which made me out to be a better thing altogether than I am. So much so that then the strange thought crossed my mind that if you have illusions perhaps I have them too, and perhaps you are less perfect than I think you. And when I had stopped scolding myself for the incredible baseness of that idea, I thought anyway, anyway, my dearest and most adored Olivia, while we can, for as long as we can, oh let us believe …’ She never ceased to do so.

In the dark December of 1913 Cornelius Cardew decided to become a monk.

The aftermath of the sense of despair which had overtaken him as he witnessed Tom Harker’s last moments – a despair which seemed to become more metaphysical the more he thought about it – had been a period of fierce thinking in which, walking steadily through mile upon mile of Surrey woods and fields he faced the fact that he had lost faith in the power of reason. Reason could not halt the rush of victor and victim into the abyss, socialist planning could not regulate the human heartbeat, the lessons of love were too harsh to be learnt without the ferocious discipline of faith.