An Education by Lynn Barber

substantial hill of beans. Sometimes we'd just be sitting on the sofa watching television and I'd glance sideways at his profile and think, Gosh! Also, of course, having a gorgeous husband meant that we had gorgeous children, which I wouldn't have done if I'd married some toad. So his looks were important. But of course there were other qualities too. He had a lovely singing voice and was always singing, everything from Count John McCormack's Irish ballads to music-hall songs. He was a brilliant cook and was never happier than when preparing a fabulous meal. He had a wonderful ‘eye’ and was always pointing out details – the painting on a pub sign, the brilliant green lichen on a tree stump – that I would not have noticed. I loved going to galleries and museums with him because he taught me so much. He also had the same black sense of humour as me – we both found it hilarious, for instance, that Tommy Cooper dropped dead of a heart attack while performing a television show called Live from Her Majesty's . Such bad taste, I know, but it was our bad taste and a strong bond precisely because other people disapproved.
    Actually we were alike in a million ways – we both hated the theatre, loved opera, hated sport, loved art galleries. We once did a psychometric test for a friend who was training to be a psychiatrist and he said he had never seen two such similar test results. We were both Geminis (though of course we didn't believe in astrology!) and were delighted to be told that Geminis should always marry each other because they made such appalling partners for anyone else – we Twins are the marital lepers of the celestial regions.
    On the other hand, we were different in one very important way. David was good . He was thoroughly kind, thoroughly truthful, thoroughly decent. Whereas I was somehow morally damaged. I had become a proficient liar in my years with Simon and found it hard to break the habit. I was also apt to do bad things if I thought I could get away with them. But at least I knew I needed to marry someone good. I didn't mind having bad hats as boyfriends – in fact I was rather attracted to them – but for a husband I wanted someone 100 per cent decent. Thank God I had the sense to see that.
    We came from very different backgrounds. David was not Mexican – that was a misunderstanding – but he grew up mainly abroad because his father worked in different countries as head of the British Council. His father Maurice came from a long line of English gentry – David's middle name, Cloudesley, commemorated one of their ancestors, the admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel – and had followed his two older brothers to Eton, Oxford and the Guards. He served with distinction as a major in the war and was involved in undercover work in Greece with Paddy Leigh-Fermor (he is mentioned in Captain Corelli's Mandolin ) and was then appointed head of the British Council in Greece. Later, he was stationed in Italy, Cyprus (where he seems to have played some sort of undercover negotiating role with Makarios), Belgium, Mexico, Thailand and finally Paris. Tall, upright, formal, always immaculately dressed, Maurice was every inch the traditional stiff-upper-lipped English gentleman, but he was not quite as conventional as he appeared. He wrote several rather good travel books and novels under the pseudonym John Lincoln, and he married Leonora, who was an actress and Jewish, i.e. not at all the sort of wife expected in his class. They made a striking couple – he so tall, fair, English, she so petite, dark, Sephardic-looking. David inherited the best of everything – his father's height and china blue eyes, his mother's thick dark hair and olive skin.
    As a young boy, David lived with his parents abroad – he remembered idyllic years in Italy and Cyprus – but then, when he was eight, his parents sent him back to prep school in England, and he didn't see them again for over a year. He spent the holidays with his Aunt