Chapter Four of Mary Lutyens's memoir of her father finds her parents at Scheveningen, on their honeymoon. 'For the first week they sat back to back on the beach in two of those old-fashioned high-backed basket chairs, she facing towards the sea and he towards the land, reaching back uncomfortably to hold hands. For the second week he took her sight-seeing when she was so sore from his love-making that she could hardly walk and felt that she should have been resting.' They had already found two incompatibilities: Emily was to go on finding Edwin's sexual demands repugnant, and Edwin was never to share Emily's enthusiasm for the seaside (like half an apple, he said).

LRB 4 December 1980 | PDF Download