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said, ‘or thereabouts. I’ll let you know the exact date later.’
    I was shattered. How would I live for nine months without touching the sacred £400? How, come to that, would I live for nine months even if I
did
touch it? I wondered how Toby was managing during this gestation period of his own. His ‘half on sig’, he’d told me, was already spent. It was awful to think he might be driven back to hack-writing to keep himself until the book came out. But I knew well how very thriftily Toby was capable of living. I had been raised too soft for such exigencies. I would have to find some way of keeping myself and David in reasonable comfort until the time came to break out and rush over to New York for my heady binge of madness.
    My father’s relief that the New York scheme was not going into action at once was severely modified when I informed him of my immediate plans. He wrung his hands and moaned: ‘Why don’t you come and live here? What have I been working hard all my life for, if not to help my only child at a moment like this?’ Such melodramatic expressions were no part of his usual lexicon, so I knew he was under great stress, and I was very tempted to give in—it would have been so lovely just to relax into his arms, so to speak, and let him take care of all my problems, as I’d discovered during the short visit I’d been paying him. But once independence gets hold of you, it becomes like an obsession to which you cling when it’s impracticaland stupid and even unkind to do so.
    So I put David in his battered carry-cot, set it on the back seat of the Galloping Maggot, and headed back for Surrey, to think.
    It was hard winter now. The track from the village was a crunchy morass of mud and ice; to maintain momentum (the tyres had no tread left and I was terrified of getting bogged down) I had to keep up a speed which resulted in the car leaping and bounding over the hidden ruts—I had to grip the lurching wheel with one hand and reach behind to pin the carry-cot down with the other. I was heartily glad to round the last bend and see the cottage, looking grey and forsaken with its masses of leafless creepers swarming up its walls like some creature about to overwhelm it, and its thatched eaves weeping icicles.
    I had been away a scant fortnight, but awful things had overtaken the poor little place in my absence. The last of everything in the garden had died, but that was inevitable, merely a gloomy prelude to what I would find inside. As I opened the door, a thin trickle of water came to meet me. Appalled, I followed it up the stairs, and found—what I might have expected—a burst pipe in the lavatory. The devastation was frightful—the whole floor (wood, of course) soaked and warped, the walls (plaster) soggy, the pipes rusty and a stench of damp everywhere. Going to my bedroom to get into some working-clothes, I made the cheering discovery that I had left the window unfastened; it had blown open in a gale, the bed was thoroughly wet (there was mildew on the eiderdown) and the carpet was apparently ruined. That the whole cottage was bitterly cold goes without saying.
    Before I could even think what action to take, David signified that he was chilled, tired and hungry. He was half on baby food now, and he liked everything nice and hot, which there really wasn’t time for, so I found a relatively dry spot in the living-room, sat down in it, ripped open my shirt with a distracted gesture and stuffed a nipple somewhat untenderlyinto his wailing jaws. While he had a snack, I made a plan of campaign. First, fires. Fortunately I’d left a supply of dry wood in all the woodboxes before I’d left, and there were electric fires that I could apply to the wetter areas in bathrooms and passages. Then, mops and pails, oh God! No, first, I’d better get a plumber. But how? I’d no idea where there was one. Oh, why had I been too mean to keep