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dropped her programme he picked it up and handed it to her.
    ‘What do you think?’ he asked her in the interval. This was her first taste of his elliptical mode of speech, and she responded to it without hesitation.
    ‘She seemed to me to be under the note in those last three,’ she said.
    ‘Perhaps she has a cold,’ he observed, and, gazing sternly ahead, remained silent for the rest of the interval. At the end of the concert they applauded moderately, while the rest of the audience expressed fervent appreciation and demanded encores.
    ‘Would you like coffee?’ he asked, as they left their seats.
    ‘I should, but my mother will be expecting me home.’
    ‘Then I will find you a taxi.’
    They met in the same place in the following week, although no arrangements had been made. After this second meeting he persuaded her to drink a cup of coffee with him in a café in Wigmore Street. She looked excited and apprehensive, as if such a thing had never happened to her before, although it must have done, since she had been an undergraduate, had left university (Bedford College) the previous June, and was now filling in time until she decided whether or not to do a teacher training course, a prospect which her mother found displeasing since she thought it guaranteed lifelong spinsterhood.
    ‘I like children,’ confided my mother. ‘But I doubt if I could keep them in order. I like a very quiet kind of life.’
    It may have been at that point that he decided to marry her.
    They proceeded cautiously. Concerts at the Wigmore Hall were eventually interspersed with visits to exhibitions at the Royal Academy and the Tate Gallery. The conversation became more profuse, but was never in any sense unedited or unguarded. Each retained a certain dignity, and it was the recognition of this quality in the other that bred a particular kind of respect, a respect, moreover, of which, for varyingreasons, they had had little experience in their past lives. During an unusually effusive walk in Kensington Gardens one evening in late summer, each made a moderate confession of attachment to the other. After this, it seemed as if marriage was inevitable.
    ‘I’m glad this happened in the park,’ said my mother.
    ‘Yes,’ he replied. The Wigmore Hall would not have been suitable. And the intervals are so inconclusive.’
    None of this was necessary as an explanation, for no more than a few sentences had been exchanged, but a rite of passage had been successfully negotiated. Linking arms, they strolled on, emerging into Exhibition Road, where he stopped a taxi for her and stood on the pavement waving goodbye until she vanished in the direction of Maresfield Gardens. Then he turned on his heel and walked back to Prince of Wales Drive, where he occupied a large bachelor flat. With a little adjustment he thought it would do very well for the two of them.
    That was the easy part. The difficult part was to introduce each other to their respective families, or in this case mothers, for one was divorced and the other widowed. Both were problematic. Of the two of them Antonia (Toni) Ferber had the edge on Eileen Manning, whose only crime was wrong-headedness. Mrs Ferber, however, had a more awesome repertory of grievances, trailed clouds of distant glory, and was more likely to confound expectations and to raise difficulties. The fact that she was not fond of her daughter did nothing to guarantee her eventual acceptance of the marriage.
    Toni Ferber, whom I later came to regard with a high degree of sympathy, was still, at the time of her daughter’sputative engagement, embroiled in the mythology of her early youth, and regretting that she had not misspent it while she had had the chance. She was marked by her girlhood, as some women are, but in an almost fatal sense, as if all the events that had occurred in later life were a disappointment, a tragic disillusionment. This realisation or understanding gave her handsome face a disdainful look, as