It was in Hampstead, a pretty little converted coach house in the grounds of their daughter Sheila’s home, a ‘mansion’, as the media had it and its kind, on the edge of the Heath. Wexford called this second home ‘a grace-and-favour apartment’ because it was elegant and charming, they paid nothing for it and it was theirs owing to Sheila’s favour and graciousness. They spent the weekend there, going to the National Theatre on Saturday night to see her in The Changeling and on Monday morning walking across the Heath to Highgate. Warned by his wife that Maxine would be in the house when they got back to Kingsmarkham, Wexford asked why they couldn’t leave two hours later, only to be told that this was impossible as Dora had to speak at a lunch organised by a children’s charity of which she was chair. Not for the first time Wexford objected to the term. ‘I’m not going to say a human being can’t be a piece of equipment for sitting on. We’ve been there before. But if it’s offensive to call a woman a bicycle, and it is, why isn’t it to call her a chair?’ ‘I don’t know, darling.
What do You think about No Man's Nightingale (2013)?
