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not.”
    â€œAnyway we had a bit of help from my mother.”
    â€œAh. I see.”
    â€œShe hardly ever wrote to me without pinning a ten shilling note to the letter. She used to fiddle the house-keeping money, my father never knew. She always pinned it on with a safety pin, a little gold one, because she didn’t think paper clips were safe, and an ordinary pin might have pricked the postman’s finger …” He smiled politely. “I should think she used to send me a pound a month. It paid for cigarettes, you know, and sometimes toys. The children never ate sweets, I don’t know why.”
    â€œIt sounds very … idyllic,” he said.
    â€œNo, it wasn’t idyllic. But it was all right.”
    â€œYou were happy. Or rather, you think now that you were happy.”
    â€œYes. I mean, I know I was.”
    â€œBut you had two divorces, and for a short time you were … a widow.”
    â€œYes. But I wasn’t unhappy. It’s as though … as though between the time I was a child and the time I married Jake nothing happened. As though everything stopped. I didn’t seem to grow any older, I didn’t seem to change at all. Then suddenly I was married to Jake and it all started again where it had left off when I was seventeen. But I was twenty-seven then. Do you understand what I mean?”
    He wrote rapidly for a full minute. When he had finished he pondered, fingers steepled under his nose. “Tell me about your first husband.”
    â€œOh lord,” I said. “I can’t remember.”
    â€œCan’t remember? But you were married to him for … nearly five years.”
    â€œHe was a reporter on our local paper. But the war broke out just after we were married and …”
    â€œHe was in the Forces?”
    â€œNo, he was a conscientious objector. They put him on the land.”
    â€œAnd what happened?”
    â€œNothing. I had the children and he … well, he worked on the land.”
    â€œYou liked him, you said?”
    â€œOh, yes. He was sweet. He drank too much, that was the only thing.”
    He waited, but I didn’t offer him any more information. I couldn’t think of any more. At last he was driven to ask, “And how did it end?”
    â€œIt didn’t really end. I met the Major — he was Dinah’s father — at a sort of … concert in the village hall. He was a very sober, military sort of school-master, rather intelligent. He read
New Writing
, and
Horizon
and so on. He was a great one for making lists. He was very interested in the children, liked teaching them to read and count beans, you know, things like that. My husband, the first one, was pretty hopeless with children. So we fell in love. I think it was quite a relief, really, divorcing me — for my husband, I mean. He cried a good deal at one point, but it was only the drink.”
    There was a long pause.
    â€œAnd then?” he asked coldly.
    â€œThen? Well, then I married the Major, but since he was going overseas we went back to live with my parents. I had Dinah there. Of course he was dead by then.”
    â€œAnd did that upset you?”
    â€œYes. Yes, I suppose it did. Naturally. It must have done.”
    He slumped in his chair. He seemed tired out. I said, “Look, need we go on with this? I find it tremendously boring, and it’s not what I’m thinking about at all. I just don’t think about those husbands except …”
    â€œExcept when?”
    â€œI never think about them.”
    â€œWe’re almost at the end.” The smile had grown even weaker. “I’m sorry if it’s a painful for you, but it helps to know the facts. Who was the next one?”
    â€œGiles. He was a professional violinist. I suppose he still is. He came with some quintet to play chamber music in the Town Hall, something to do with C.E.M.A. or E.N.S.A. or one of those things. Anyway, the Major