You and Audrey have so often proclaimed the need—in our world of sorrow and care—of a “bland” novel, defining it as one to be read when in bed with a sore throat, that as an adventurer in letters I have frequently felt tempted to write one for you. But the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and seemed perversely to have turned against novels altogether, perhaps because I had been labelled “novelist,” as though one had set up a factory. (Two a year is, I believe, the correct output.) However, here is a novel at last—my first this century—and there is a further reason for presuming to associate you with it, because it is largely from the vantage-point of your Essex homestead that I have, during …
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