I said, ‘It is years since I felt the chill of an English winter, oh my dearest. I want to walk in the fog and kick up the dead leaves.’ ‘Why?’ asked Robert, in a reasonable tone, and I saw that I had approached the matter from the wrong angle. ‘Monica is my oldest friend,’ I said. ‘I have known her all my life and I have known Margaret since she was a tiny little girl. I must go to her wedding. When she was a tiny little child I gave my word that I would go to her wedding.’ ‘You haven’t been asked yet,’ said Robert.

Oh, the horrible journey and the horrible cold! I had had a little fever before I left home and, as always, had imagined that, by contrast, it would be wonderful to be chilled to the bone. Now I could think of nothing more delightful than sitting in an African garden, baking like a cake. I could feel the fog going up my nose and there was nothing I could do about it. If I complained to Robert I should simply look a fool, for I had brought it all on myself. I was going to have to make the best of it.

We were staying at a dreadful little hotel on the Uxbridge Road. It seemed to me extravagantly, unnecessarily dreadful so I wasted no time in writing to Monica with congratulations on her daughter’s engagement. I could have telephoned but letters are safer: more formal, and demanding of a response from the well brought up English gentlewoman. She wrote back immediately inviting us to stay with her, and I danced a bit on the disgusting linoleum of the dreadful hotel bedroom. Robert had gone to the gallery where his pictures were to be shown, so I had some time to decide how to break the news to him. I have found that men often do not like staying in other people’s houses. I don’t know why. Besides he was bound to assume I had been ‘sponging’ again.

When I heard his footsteps outside the bedroom door I lit another cigarette. I had already smoked a packet and I had put a lot of shillings into the meter, so the gas-fire had been hissing all afternoon. ‘God,’ said Robert, ‘what a fug!’

‘It doesn’t matter, my darling,’ I said. ‘We’re not staying.’ Robert put his hat on the bed. He was being difficult, but that didn’t matter either. I always got my own way. I told him there were cockroaches behind the skirting board, and the lorries roaring down the Uxbridge Road had kept me awake all night. I said the proprietor of this hotel had not changed the sheets since the previous occupant, but had merely ironed them in situ on the bed. I said I was convinced the previous occupant had been diseased, for I had found shreds of bloodstained tissue sticking to the sides of the waste-paper basket. I did all the talking while Robert took his coat and his shoes off. I had hoped that he would say we couldn’t afford to go anywhere better so that I could announce that we were going to save money by staying with Monica, but he said, ‘I suppose you’ve got hold of Monica,’ and I remembered that he knew me well. Sometimes I thought that he didn’t like me much. ‘It makes perfect sense,’ I said. ‘Besides Monica leads a most dull life and we will add some interest and glamour to it. This is a kindness we are doing.’ It was true.