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the Lynch-Gibbons have, which is a cross between the philosopher
Hume and the actor Garric and my hair is the brown floppy hair
which fades with age to the colour of white pepper. Our family, thank
God, never becomes bald.

I took a decisive step when I married Antonia. I was then thirty,
and she was thirty-five. She looks now, for all her beauty, a little
older than her years, and has more than once been taken for my
mother. My real mother, who among other things was a painter, died
when I was sixteen, but at the time of my marriage, my father was
still alive and I had hitherto been but casually involved in the wine
trade. I was more concerned, though that also in a dilettante fashion,
with being a military historian, a type of study in which, if I could
have brought myself to abandon my amateur status, I might have
excelled. When I married Antonia, however, everything came, for
some time, to a standstill. As I say, I was fortunate to get her. Antonia
had been, and indeed still was, a somewhat eccentric society beauty.
Her father was a distinguished regular soldier, and her mother, who
came out of the Bloomsbury world, was something of a minor poet
and a remote relation of Virginia Woolf. For some reason Antonia
never got a sensible education, though she lived abroad a great deal
and speaks three languages fluently: and also, for some reason, and
although much courted, she did not marry young. She moved in a
fashionable society, more fashionable than that which I frequented,
and became, through her protracted refusal to marry, one of its
scandals. Her marriage to me, when it came, was a sensation.

I was not sure at the time, and am still not sure, whether I was
precisely what Antonia wanted, or whether she didn’t take me simply
because she felt it was time to take somebody. However that may be,
we were formidably happy, and for quite a long time, handsome
clever couple that we were, we were everyone’s darlings. So for a
while everything was for me at a standstill and I was absorbed
completely into the delightful task of being Antonia’s husband. When
I as it were came round, emerged, that is, from the warm golden haze
of those honey-moon years, I found that certain roads were closed to
me. My father had died meanwhile, and I settled down to being a
wine merchant, still and even here feeling myself something of an
amateur and none the worse for that and although my conception of

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