I spent as little time with Syl as I possibly could. He didn’t seem to mind. He had few friends but many acquaintances. He played tennis and golf and sometimes went swimming, determined to give no appearance of succumbing to time, to age. I saw that he could not marry a woman of his own generation, for that would double his chances of seeming old. It was sad for me, I thought, that I was the only girl in the world sufficiently stupid to permit herself to be sacrificed to his vanity. I had few friends, just one or two left over from school, but on the infrequent occasions when we met I could see from their faces that they pitied me, finding me foolish and Syl a bore. He somehow seemed familiar with the jokes that the young were making and used their slang. He embarrassed my friends, and I saw them less and less. He even behaved to my mother, his exact contemporary, as though she were much older than he, deferring to her opinions with an air of youthful naïveté. She colluded with him. I had seen her ruffle his hair as though he were a little boy. I knew myself to be stupid, but I sometimes felt that I wasn’t alone, and that stupidity was a condition which age did not ease. This was against all that was implicit in the way I had been taught—people increased in wisdom as they grew older, so that they were able to guide the young in the paths they should follow. But my mother had no learning, no wide experience: merely the prejudices, the powerfully surviving clichés, of her own upbringing. Knowing this, I was still impotent, for I had nothing to put in its stead, no one to turn to for advice or support, and I had learned for myself nothing of life except that I was bad at living, and that where I loved I met only rejection and disaster. My father feared my mother as much as I did and wished me to please and agree with her always, for when I did not she would complain to him of my behaviour and I suspected that when this happened his new wife would complain in her turn that he paid too much attention to us and too little to her and her own children. I didn’t like to cause trouble. Troublemakers were visible by reason of their demeanour and I wished to be observed as little as possible. I wished to get through life along the lanes and side roads, unseen.

One weekend I went with Syl to stay with some people in the country. I don’t remember much about it, only dim rooms and firelight, a dinner of steak-and-kidney pudding and broccoli, which I recall because I disliked it—the smell of urine in the meat, laughter at conversation I did not understand.