She paid all the time, of course – but with Charles Bannister, it seemed, paying was never enough. One had to pay, and get out; that was usually insisted on. There was the small scandal with the hat-check girl who turned out to be married: there was the slightly larger affair, involving the doped racehorse at Newmarket (the English racing people were so fatuously strict); there was the really resounding row that stretched right down to South Africa, and the Indian who had diamonds to sell, and the man from Kimberley who was the go-between, and the police who, unaccountably, swooped down on them at Cannes … As usual, nothing could quite be proved; as usual, she paid, and they moved on.

The climax came in London, just before the war; the climax was Lady Julia Wroy.

By this time, Charles Bannister no longer pretended to keep office hours or do any work; she made him an allowance, and they lived in a flat in Mayfair for which, of course, she paid the rent. Now, after ten disastrous years, they were near to separation: he was really costing too much, there had been too many scenes and crises, too many people were sorry for her, she had lost too many friends. Even their rare nuptial contacts had taken on the same aspect of exploitation: it seemed to cost several hundred pounds every time she went to bed with him … What tipped the balance against him, and his resilient, rubber good humour, and his tailored insolvency, and the whole sordid chain of intrigue and lying, was, surprisingly, a woman.

It was surprising because women had never been a specially destructive element in their marriage. But there was something in the Lady Julia Wroy episode which finally stuck in her throat. It was not the fact that he was openly sleeping with this indolent young whore; there had been a number of such incidents, and flagrant affairs of this kind were apparently fashionable, in the well-connected world in which Charles Bannister still lived. It was the fact that he expected Mrs Bannister to foot the bill for it.

When she refused – since the girl, nurtured in the bosom of the English upper classes, was very expensive – he embarked on a course of open theft. He pledged her credit at hotels and restaurants. He converted the money for the rent to his own bank account. He took the servants’ wages from her purse. He ran up a series of bills, for food, drink, clothes, and jewellery, which unloosed upon their flat a hideous succession of duns and creditors.

Once they had encountered each other, in different parties, at a night club. The girl was sitting close by his side, almost in his lap – a half-dressed, haggard blonde with a face like a bored skull. He had waved gaily, and raised his champagne glass towards her. Some time after he had left, an envelope was presented to her, ‘with Captain Bannister’s compliments’. It was his bill.