She dabs her mouth with her napkin, leaving a trace of pink lipstick with the dislodged crumbs. ‘For the pockets,’ she says. ‘Stan always liked a pocket. It’s hard to get shirts with pockets, you know. Stan used to blame it on the smoking ban.’

‘Suits have pockets,’ Mercia points out.

‘Stan gave up suits when he retired. Except for golf club dinners and funerals, that sort of thing.’

They both look at me quickly.

‘Sorry. Insensitive of me,’ Betty says.

I wave my hand. Don’t worry.

Cafe Rouge is filling up with mothers and small children. The noise level rises.

‘School’s ended,’ Mercia says, looking around and smiling. But her mind is now on her husband, too, and his clothes. ‘The first time I went out with Bertie, he drove us to Brighton in an open-top car that he borrowed. He wore a suit to the beach. After we’d been married about ten years, he took to wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and khaki shorts with turn-ups.’

‘I don’t think there was such a thing as casual wear in those days,’ I point out. ‘My casual wear was my cricket whites and a football jersey for sport. We dressed for the occasion. Casual meant taking off one’s tie.’ I chuckle to myself. ‘For my eightieth, we went out for a meal and Enid asked George to wear a tie – he turned up at the restaurant wearing it around his head!’

They laugh sympathetically.

‘This kind of conversation should make us feel old, but I don’t feel old at all,’ Betty says. ‘I feel younger than them,’ she says, looking at the mothers. ‘We don’t have their worries.’

I realise that I’ve never been drunk with Betty and Mercia before. I have an urge to ask them about Enid and whether she knew about my sartorial penchants. I feel it’s important to know whether she’d have thought like them, or whether she’d have mocked me like the two women in Kentish Town. If I ask, I have to be prepared to live with the answer. And if I don’t, I’ll miss my chance because I might never get drunk with them again.

‘Penny for them,’ Mercia says, and her eyes are kind.

I decide that, all things considered, it’s something that I would like to find out one way or another, so I take my courage in both hands. ‘Did Enid know that I had a fondness for her clothes?’

Betty and Mercia snap their heads towards each other, wide-eyed.

I raise my glass aloft and stare at the bubbles, wishing I could drown in them.

‘It’s not anything that we discussed,’ Betty says after a moment, ‘although she did once ask me if Stan had ever expressed an interest that way. But he was a lot bigger than you, Kim. Nothing of mine would have gone near him.’