Beside the boxes he kept his current Game Book, which was bound in black morocco leather like its many predecessors. For years now he had had the habit of every now and then, on finishing the entry for the day, turning the book back to front and letting his pen wander with his thoughts. The first time he had done it had been in the winter of 1893 when Minnie was spending a lot of time away. One day a letter had arrived from Easton Lodge, where she was staying with Daisy Brooke, the Prince of Wales being of the party.

‘So my husband is forty, or will be on the day he gets this letter. I have bought you something I think will amuse you but I shan’t send it because I want to see your face when you open it’ – (It had been an absurdly expensive cigar case) – ‘Of course you have always been quite wise enough to be forty, and that has often made me wonder why you put up with me who am silly enough to be sixteen. How I wish I were with you.’ He knew she meant it. He also knew that it would have seemed to many people that there was nothing to prevent her being with him if indeed she wished it. Nothing kept her from him but a party. Minnie’s priorities, however, were different from his own and he had never felt that marriage had given him any particular right to question them. So he had turned the Game Book round – he had been filling it in when a servant had brought him her letter – and had written, ‘My wife and I are very fond of each other but she cares for Society more than I do.’ It was true. Their mutual disappointment only made them more tender of each other’s feelings. That winter though, he had had plenty of time for the Game Book. He had had to accustom himself to being what the world considered a complaisant husband, and the Game Book had helped him a little in that respect.

The complaisance was in some ways – or in one particular way at all events – more apparent than real, but this was a detail which he considered too intimate ever to be mentioned to anyone, certainly not merely in order to save his own face. The fact was that Minnie disliked sex. The familiarity of the marital bed made his own attentions acceptable to her from time to time, and it was also possible that at some time or other a Royal desire might have been interpreted as a Royal command. He had never asked her about that, but he knew and had always known that apart from that possible exception the world’s gossip was inaccurate – she was a faithful wife. The knowledge had not saved him from all distress – indeed in some ways it had added to it, by constituting what might have been a weapon on her side – but the intermittent loneliness and disappointment of earlier years had gradually given way to a more settled and contemplative melancholy which as his daughter-in-law Ida sometimes pointed out, he on the whole enjoyed.