She was married at twenty-one to Adrian Dadswell, who, with more ambition than ancestry, was not quite the husband her parents would have chosen; however, this being the late 1960s when so many sons of respectable families were going to ruin, they decided he would have to do. At twenty-three she became mother to a premature baby whose damaged brain defied the sweet destiny of pedigree. Such misfortune would have overwhelmed most people, but not Elizabeth who persisted with her exquisitely tailored life, struggled along in a fog of fatigue, until at a miserable thirty she asked herself, ‘What price love? What price heritage?’ and rifling through dreams dusty from neglect found no answers. At thirty-two she asked Adrian to leave and she and Ginnie, who was only nine at the time, set about making the house their home. Elizabeth gave Adrian’s dun-coloured leather chair to the Salvation Army; she sold his desk to the plumber and bought a new bed. With the assistance of old Mr Jamieson the gardener, Elizabeth set up the new bed in the formal lounge, the room in which for the ten years of their marriage, Adrian had dispensed liquor and camaraderie to miscellaneous companions – some of whom were Elizabeth’s friends, many of whom were not.
