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In the bathroom all such considerations, disliked equally by Norman Britt and Marie, were left behind. Romance ruled their brief sojourns, and love sanctified—or so they believed—the passion of their physical intimacy. Love excused their eccentricity, for only love could have found in them a willin…

Years instead of months began to go by. On the juke-box in the Drummer Boy the voice of Elvis Presley was no longer heard. ‘Why she had to go I don’t know,’ sang the Beatles, ‘ she didn’t say . . . I believe in yesterday.’ And Eleanor Rigby entered people ’s lives, and Sergeant Pepper Lovers of The…

Marie had said that she wanted to give him the children he had never had. She wanted to have children at once and she knew she could. He knew it too: having children was part of her, you’d only to look at her.

Yet that would mean she ’d have to give up her job, which she wanted to do when she ma…

‘I want to marry you, Norman. I want us to be together. I don’t want just going to a bathroom in some hotel.’

‘I know; I want to marry you too. But we ’ve got to work it out. You know we’ve got to work it out, Marie—getting married.’

‘Yes, I know.’

It was a familiar topic of conversation b…

‘Oh, darling,’ she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. It was foggy and cold. The fog was in her pale hair, tiny droplets that only he, being close to her, could see. People hurried through the lit-up station, weary faces anxious to be home.

‘I know,’ he sa…