Veetie was in her late thirties, and had only recently become the sort of woman who took things into her own hands. She had spent most of her life having decisions made for her by other people, first by her Home Counties parents, and then by her controlling boyfriend, whom she unthinkingly and unwisely replaced with an exact replica when he left her. Her parents had bullishly argued against her going to university, insisting that Lucy Clayton Secretarial College would provide her with impeccable qualifications for a regular income, and invaluable training for her future career as a wife. And so Veetie spent her twenties as a secretary in the City and her early thirties as an administrator, but in fact devoted all her real energy to being a homemaker, for two successive partners who didn’t appreciate her devotion enough to want to make the arrangement permanent. It was when she turned thirty-five that it became obvious to her that Pete, her boyfriend of five years, had no intention of asking her to marry him, or even remaining faithful. It became equally obvious to her that the decisions made for her by other people had not been the most helpful, and that nothing was going to happen for her unless she did something about it herself. She left Pete and enrolled in the Open University in French and Business Studies; with her degree eventually achieved, she fought for more recognition at work. It had been a major coup for her to have been taken on the business trip to Paris, even though the senior colleagues had treated her like a bag-carrier throughout the whole day, ending with the final and supreme putdown at the airport bar, when they had decided that their hand luggage was too cumbersome to keep with them and had dispatched Veetie to take their bags to the Business Class lounge, clinking their whisky glasses as she made her embarrassed, over-burdened exit.