‘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.

I left the dreadful hotel that afternoon. Robert had gone back into the city in order, I think, to assert his independence. The proprietor of the dreadful hotel took our suitcases down to the cab and stood watching as it drove away. I waved to him and sat back feeling a sense of comfort and gratification since I had done nothing to charm him and he was still sorry to see me go. There I was, going to a better place, and there was this unattractive stranger mourning my departure from his dreadful hotel. Clever Lili. I had some tiny misgivings about Robert, but I knew he’d come round in the end. Apart from the fact that he loved me he was much too sensible to turn down the offer of free hospitality. There was a remote chance that he might stay with some other friend, but most of the people we knew in London lived in discomfort in little flats or single rooms or studios, sharing bathrooms and washing their paintbrushes in the lavatory. They thought it was bohemian. Robert was really no fonder of squalor than I was myself. He’d be along in the course of time. Anyway all his clothes and his toothbrush were in a suitcase next to the driver.