The danger here is that he could be presented as a fool, with no requirement for the reader to get close to him. Often he read to himself particular passages from the will, imagining the delight and surprise with which it would be heard for the first time by his wife and children, not merely for the precision of the language but because they had no idea of the value of the investments.

This difficulty in his vision is put comically in one of the earliest chapters, as Mr Bridge contemplates his posthumous bequests: “The idea of life without her caused him to move restlessly.” So, if his story doesn’t quite chime with Mrs Bridge, we can pretend it’s because he doesn’t notice what she does, says or thinks anyway. He has no real idea how his own household operates, and is in awe at the wonders his wife works with it. Words can be interpreted, nailed into place – that is his job – whereas people remain fuzzy and hard to pin down. He is a lawyer, a man who sees language clearly but whose vision of humanity is myopic. Anyway, Connell has given himself a minor get-out by the very character that Walter Bridge takes. Frankly to comment on that, I would need to have read Mrs Bridge more recently (rather than just thinking I had). With Mr Bridge, published in 1968, nine years after Mrs, Connell faces the task of making a book both familiar and new, and with all the internal consistencies that a companion volume requires. I couldn’t wait until then to read the second volume, of course, and now that I’ve read it, have to get it out of my head and onto the screen right now. Mrs Bridge, then, will be reissued in July 2012, with Mr Bridge to follow in 2013.

Back then, in the innocent days of April 2010, I asked “Classics imprints, where are you?” The answer was: here all along, because even then (quite independently of my plea) Penguin Modern Classics slowly and surely drew their plans to do the decent thing. Connell’s novel Mrs Bridge? It feels like I just finished it. How else to explain that it’s approaching two years since I read and raved over Evan S.

Mrs bridge book