‘Absolutely.’ I pulled the comfortable chair in closer to the table. ‘Yes, it’s marvellous, especially now they’ve let us loose on the patients. The classroom part’s a real slog, but it’s worth it once you get out there on the wards.’ I had been nursing now for over a year and I knew I had made the right choice. I was being sucked into the rigours and rituals of the General Hospital which took us young and unformed and bent us to its demands, its disciplines.

‘I’m sure you’re terrific at it,’ Olivia said. It was typical of her to have such implicit faith in me.

‘I just can’t imagine wanting to do anything else.’ I smiled back at her, taking in her appearance. ‘I say, Livy – you look marvellous. So glamorous.’

She was wearing a perfectly tailored suit in royal blue and her hair was pinned stylishly, swept back from her forehead. Beside her on the table lay a wide-brimmed blue hat and leather gloves. She was made up, lips a rich scarlet, and she looked stunning.

Of the four of us she seemed suddenly the most grown up. William had taken to Oxford with apparent ease, his conversation when he came home full of rugger and student pranks. Angus was enjoying his training at Vittoria Street. But both of them seemed comparatively unchanged, except that they had moved on to something new. Whereas Olivia dressed now with sophistication, made her face up routinely in a way I never did and seemed suddenly adult.

‘You’ll have to take me in hand,’ I teased as we sipped our white wine. ‘There’s you looking like something out of Harper’s and me in my frumpy old uniform . . .’

Olivia grimaced and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. ‘There’ve got to be some compensations, I suppose.’ She picked up the menu and laid it in front of her but didn’t read it. The band was playing ‘Blue Moon’. A shaft of autumn sunlight fell into a warm rectangle across our table.

‘The job’s not getting any better then?’

‘I hate, hate, hate it!’ Suddenly she was storming at me. Olivia had not been given a choice. The Kemps decreed that she should do a year’s secretarial training, something useful, not these airy-fairy notions about study and music. She was to become versed in Pitman and commerce. As well as the proverbial ‘something to fall back on’ (which I’m sure in their hearts they never thought she’d need) it was to be her entrée to a suitable marriage. She would rise through a prominent company and marry well, preferably the boss. She had worked now for six weeks at Leggett and Martin, an insurance company which occupied prestigious offices in Colmore Row.

The smile had dropped from her lips. ‘It’s so tedious and arid. I can’t bear it.’ She looked into my eyes. ‘I know I may not be brilliant at music or anything else – ’

‘You’re exceptionally good, though,’ I interrupted fiercely. I felt frustrated on her behalf. It wasn’t as if the Kemps were short of money. They could have allowed her more freedom to choose.