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little terrace house in First Street, just off Walton Street (‘I can smell Harrods,’ said Letitia contentedly), four tiny floors, one above the other. Property prices were just setting off on their dizzy postwar course and they got it just in time; it cost two thousand pounds and they were lucky. It was charmingly shabby, but quite unspoilt; it had belonged to an old lady, who had resolutely refused to leave it until the very last All Clear sounded, when she had finally agreed to join her family in the depths of Somerset and promptly died. They acquired much of her furniture along with the house, some of it treasures, including some extremely valuable Indian and Persian carpets, but for the most part rather too heavily Victorian for the light sunny little house. Almost everything at Maltings was too big and although James was guiltily generous, urging them to take anything they wanted, neither of them felt they should bring too many remnants of their old life into the new. Letitia brought the Sheraton escritoire and four exquisite eighteenth-century drawing room chairs left to her by her grandmother and Julian salvaged a Regency card table which had belonged to his father before his marriage and an ornate seventeenth-century bracket clock which had always looked rather overdressed on the fireplace at Maltings. ‘It’s a towny clock,’ he said to Letitia, ‘we should take it where it will feel more at home.’ Apart from that, he left everything, except a setof first-edition prints of the
Just So Stories
which had been a present from his godfather, and which he said reminded him of one of the happier episodes in the war.
    They managed to find a few pretty things – a brass-headed bed for Letitia, who said she had always longed for one, a small Hepplewhite-style sideboard, and an enchanting love seat for the drawing room – all at country-house sales. The London shops were beginning to look a little less stark, but there was nothing either Julian or Letitia really felt right for their playhouse, as Letitia called it, so they hunted for curtains and fabrics as well. Letitia rescued her old Singer machine from Maltings and set to work, cutting down and adapting huge dusty brocades they acquired at a sale, and hanging them at her new drawing room windows.
    They were altogether perfectly happy: it was Royal Wedding Year and Princess Elizabeth was planning her wedding to the dashing Prince Philip; London was in party mood, and very busy in every way; bombed theatres (most notably the Old Vic) were being rebuilt, and galleries and museums reopened, holding out their treasures proudly for inspection again, after years of fearful concealment. The social scene was frantic, as people struggled to re-create a normal pleasurable life; Julian and Letitia lunched, shopped and gossiped, went to the theatre (Letitia daringly bought seats for
A Streetcar Named Desire
, but actually confessed to preferring
Brigadoon
), and the cinema (Julian’s own special favourite being
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
, which he saw three times), and listened to concerts. Julian also launched himself on a lifetime passion for cars, and bought himself a prewar Wolseley saloon, scorning the Utility-style modern models, and feeling, as he settled into its soft deep leather seat, and behind its huge steering wheel, that this was for him precisely what First Street and the proximity of Harrods was for Letitia: a wholly desirable place to be.
    And they entertained and were entertained tirelessly, a charming if slightly eccentric couple, providing in one deliciously simple package a single man and the perfect excuse to invite him anywhere. No hostess need fear she might appear herself to be pursuing Julian Morell, so charming, so handsome, so delightfully available, but still not quite yet a properly known commodity, or to be hurling him rather precipitately ather single women friends, when he could so easily and without any embarrassment be invited to