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By Root 274 0

of thing in magazines. What it means in practice is that she messes her food around distastefully in the dining room, already slightly off-colour from acute and raging boredom, and ends up smuggling most of it down to Kiki, who is seated on her lap. In between meals she can be seen in a café near the station eating cakes. The story behind this is interesting. Her noble husband, in urgent need of an heir, has dispatched her here with instructions to get herself into working order; should this not come to pass, Monica will be given her cards and told to vacate the premises so that Sir John can make alternative arrangements. Naturally, she sulks. She eats cakes as others might go slumming. But she is very sad because she too longs for a child and I don’t think she will ever have one. She is so beautiful, so thin, so over-bred. Her pelvis is like a wishbone!

‘Our outings so far have followed a regular pattern. We wander through the town, while she gestures disdainfully at the goods, some of them very expensive, in the little shops. Then, when we arrive at Haffen-negger’s, she decides that she must have a cup of coffee, urgently. It is like being out with a child; she stops dead and refuses to go any further, and then Kiki starts up, and in we go. The cup of coffee escalates into several cakes, for she doesn’t bother to pretend with me. She says she feels safe with me (who doesn’t?) and the long rigmarole of her dilemma is poured forth once again. She hates and fears her husband, but only because he has not protected her, and she sees herself condemned to loneliness and exile. In this she is prescient. I see her, some years hence, a remittance woman, paid to live abroad, in such an hotel, in various Hotels du Lac, her beautiful face grown gaunt and scornful, her dog permanently under her arm. Her last weapon will be an unyielding snobbishness, which is already in evidence. She despises her husband’s family as jumped-up ironmongers (I understand that one of his ancestors invented some small but crucial industrial implement at the beginning of the nineteenth century) and glorifies her own particularly feckless lot. She is what Iris Pusey would call a fortune-hunter. But it is unlikely that another fortune will be hers, and her fine hieratic face droops into sadness as she contemplates what she can see of her future.

‘Naturally, all this is taking up much of the time that I intended to spend on my book, but I have been thinking that I might stay on a little longer. The weather is still beautiful.

‘And I am getting some much needed exercise. A man here, a Mr Neville, who looks rather like that portrait of the Duke of Wellington that was stolen from the National Gallery some time ago, took me out on a very long walk yesterday …’

Edith laid down her pen, for it would have been inappropriate to continue. Coarse and mean thoughts hovered on the edges of her mind, waiting for a chance to take over. It was not, in fact, much to her taste to spend so much time talking about clothes or calculating other women’s incomes or chances: such discussions had always seemed to her to be of intrinsically poor quality. And yet she was invariably drawn into such conversations, and although playing no active part, did not retire from them altogether untainted. Monica, for example. With Monica she entered a rueful world of defiance, of taunting, of teasing, of spoiling for a fight. The whole sorry business of baiting the sexual trap was uncovered by Monica’s refusal to behave herself in a way becoming to a wife: by sheer effrontery she would damage her husband’s pride, humble him into keeping her, or, if not, ruin his reputation. And although cast adrift while he pursued other interests, other plans, she was waiting for him, as one waits for an enemy; once they met, she would, by dint of insult and outrage, reawaken the fury that had once been between them. And until he came she would spend his money, waste his time, meditate her revenge. And, like the grand adventuress that she had once been, she would need a female attendant, a meek and complaisant