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By Root 776 0

was beginning to unravel, and, though it was not immediately as apparent, so was mine. At this long distance it is hard to assign blame—and hardly necessary—but like so many of our contemporaries we were paying for a whole slew of mistakes: of marrying too young, of giving more thought to work than to marriage, of sowing wild oats once one was married rather than before, of being perhaps the last generation to look at marriage in the old, conventional way. It had not dawned on any of us as yet that this was an arrangement that guaranteed that the woman felt stifled, while the man felt he was being taken advantage of, and that offered the maximum opportunity to both for resentment and infidelity.

IN THE meantime, there was no sitting on our laurels, such as they were. The main disadvantage of success is that it has to be repeated. I had the good fortune to have inherited from Bob the English writer R. F. Delderfield, whose enormous multigenerational family sagas, set for the most part in the English countryside, suddenly acquired great popularity in the United States. This started a vogue that lasted for more than a decade for huge novels in the Trollopian mode, usually wearing on their dust jackets wraparound paintings in full color of the English countryside, with a pair of riders cantering along a country lane on the front. God only knows why Bob had not taken Delderfield with him to Knopf—perhaps, for once, he had merely guessed wrong and underrated the potential of this hitherto obscure writer, who seemed able to dash off a thousand-page novel almost overnight and whose productivity was alarming. In addition to other works of his, we published The Green Gauntlet with enormous success—a perfect example of being lucky rather than smart, since nobody had predicted that the book would sell—and went on to do God Is an Englishman, which established Delderfield as such a major best-selling novelist that it was thought necessary for me to go to England to meet him, lest he decide to follow Bob to Knopf now that he had vaulted onto the best-seller lists. R. F. Delderfield (Ronnie, as he was known to those close to him) lived outside Sidmouth, a small English seaside resort between Torquay and Lyme Regis, and indicated that he would be delighted to see me.

I flew to London, rented a car, drove down to Sidmouth and checked into the Hotel Victoria Regina, a vast red-brown nineteenth-century brick structure that combined the potted-palm grandeur of the late Victorian age—it actually had an all-girl string orchestra playing in the palm court at lunchtime—with the pervasive odor of furniture polish, mildew, and Brussels sprouts peculiar to English provincial hotel keeping. The empty promenade and the shingled beach on this gray afternoon in late October were windswept and wet with rain, even the seagulls huddled miserably for cover beneath the empty band shell on the pier. Through rain-lashed plate-glass windows I could see the English Channel busily demonstrating why Napoleon and Hitler had hesitated to cross it—slate-gray swells several feet high, crowned with plumes of wind-driven white sea spray, came pounding in one after another to crash on the rocks and shingles of the shoreline. This was familiar country to me. Not far from here was the school to which I was evacuated at the beginning of the war, when it had been assumed that London would be reduced to rubble overnight by the Luftwaffe. As it turned out, my school was one of the first places in England the Germans bombed, and I can still remember the excitement of watching the bombs fall one by one onto the beach, sending up plumes of sand, until the last one blew up the school’s brick gardener’s shed with a satisfying bang. During my national service, I had taken the same road to go back and forth to London on weekends from my training camp at Bodmin, riding the motorcycle my Aunt Alexa had bought me over my father’s strong objections.

Having been invited for tea, I arrived at the Delderfields’ cottage just before four in the afternoon and was greeted by Mrs. Delderfield,