Waugh's marriage to Evelyn Gardner lasted just over a year. They met in 1927. In December Waugh proposed, and was accepted in one of those desultory telephone conversations that later become a dispiriting indicator of Adam and Nina's disengaged engagement in Vile Bodies. Six months later, the diary entries for the marriage are rather unpropitious:

Lady Burghclere, Waugh's reluctant mother-in-law, confessed herself to be ‘quite inexpressibly pained’ by the match. But the couple were very much in love, as their friends later remembered. Pansy Lamb recalls She-Evelyn's ‘tremendous warmth of manner … very lavish with darlings and dearests but really warm’. For Harold Acton, ‘she might have been his little sister. She was extremely like him, a rather boyish little girl’. The atmosphere in their Canonbury flat was ‘that of a sparkling nursery: Blake's Songs of Innocence belonged there, and Alice in Wonderland’.

In the early months of the marriage Waugh was seeing Decline and Fall through the press, and making money as a freelance journalist. In February 1929 he landed a free passage on a new Mediterranean cruiser – a trip intended to help his wife recuperate from German measles, and provide material for his first travel book, Labels. Unfortunately She-Evelyn fell ill with double pneumonia and the trip was abandoned in Egypt. After her recovery, they rejoined the cruise in Cairo and returned to England in May. Once settled in London, Waugh began work on Vile Bodies, pursuing the routine he had established with Decline and Fall, writing in a country retreat during the week, and coming home at weekends. But in July She-Evelyn confessed she was in love with another man. After an ostensibly reconciliatory fortnight together, she left him without warning. Her friends were as startled as her husband.