“God, it’s like being in a Jane Austen novel,” she quipped, but he looked blank and she remembered that he never read fiction.

Back in Kensington, among her friends, it was common knowledge how things stood. “Look at him,” Diana would say, slit-eyed, through a cloud of cigarette smoke, and they would all turn dutifully to look him up and down. “He’s got no sense of humour and no culture, and he always wears a tie, and he manages to be good-looking without having any sex appeal whatsoever. Do you know what I mean?” She would grimace and shudder, and all her friends would laugh and say yes, they knew exactly what she meant. He never said anything in his own defence, and it was hard to tell whether he minded her jibes or not. If he minded, why did he always show up to the next party, and the next, his tie more carefully knotted than ever?

Mr. Byrne—her friends went by their Christian names, but he was always Mr. Byrne—kept inviting her to stay at his ancestral home in Devon, and she kept saying no, until one day she felt especially rootless and bored and said yes.

He showed her every room, from attic to cellar, in his efforts to persuade her. She longed to say something cutting, but it wasn’t so easy without her friends there to egg her on, and anyway, Byrne Hall had rendered her speechless. The Georgians and Victorians on the walls, the antique books, the furniture, the gardens, the woods, the views, the sheer scale of the place. They meandered from room to room—she in her gypsy dress and sandals, he with his jacket and tie and his hand on the small of her back—and as she took it all in she made rapid calculations in her head.

On the one hand, she disliked Mr. Byrne.

On the other hand, she didn’t like anyone much. Or rather, she liked people en masse, at parties, and she liked the way she saw herself through their eyes, but she didn’t like anyone in particular. There was a general idea, among her friends and the world at large, that Love was the be-all and end-all of life, but she took this to be a cliché.

“What you’ve never known, you’ll never miss,” as one of her nannies used to say—she forgets which; there were several.

“All right,” Diana said it with a little shrug. “I’ll marry you.”

She tried to move past him into the garden—she wanted to see those roses again—but Mr. Byrne blocked her way and kissed her. Her mouth hurt afterward, and she could feel the imprint of his fingers on her arms long after he’d let go, but she made a decision not to mind. She owed him something in return, she supposed.