His face wore that dreamy sorrowful look it often did when he spoke of the past. Twelve years ago he must have been about sixty. He’s dead now but he was my mother’s first cousin, her father’s brother’s son, that brother being the man who had deserted his family when his child was just two. Max was a professor of Modern History at London University. By the sound of it he had spent all his twenties getting one degree after another, he had more of them than anyone I’ve ever come across. All that time, my mother used to say, old Mrs. Fisherton went out office cleaning and flat cleaning to give him an allowance over and above whatever it was the scholarships paid. He was a very tall, very thin man for his age, a condition of fitness he put down to jogging round Regent’s Park three mornings a week. I never saw him dressed otherwise than casually, in tracksuits most of the time, through the round necklines of which his long scaly neck emerged like a turtle’s. For work he wore a tweed jacket over one of those tracksuit tops and a pair of baggy trousers. His face was not so much boyish as babyish, though of course an elderly baby’s. His smooth forehead bulged and so did his cheeks, his eyes were round and his nose turned up. What hair he had left he grew long at the back, to compensate perhaps for the lack of much at the front. It was white and fluffy and covered his ears.

Strangely enough, for Selina was thought of as good-looking, he and she were rather alike. You could have taken her for his much younger sister. She was—is, I suppose—a small woman but no one would have called her short, for that word implies stockiness and solidity. Selina is slight and dainty, a Barbie doll or a fairy on a Christmas tree. Her legs are shapely and beautifully carved, as if made of some pale shiny wood such as sycamore and turned on a lathe. Her face is shaped like a plump heart and her eyes bulge a little, her nose is delicately tip-tilted, her mouth another heart. Round cheeks repeat themselves in her alarmingly large, gravity-defying breasts which pout and bounce, the nipples showing themselves like fingertips pointing through her clothes whenever she is animated.

I never saw her in trousers or sweaters. She was as formal in her dress as he was casual, favoring little suits with short flared skirts and nipped waist jackets or dresses with belts and big padded shoulders. Lots of jewelry, lots of heavy makeup, her nails always painted, her mouth outlined in dark red and filled in with rose-pink to make it look even juicier and plumper. I’ve met a lot of actresses over the past few years, seeing to the electrics in their flats and houses, some of them very famous, and off-set or offstage they’ve always looked—well, like me, jeans and T-shirts, no makeup, and as if they’ve never seen the inside of a hairdresser’s. Perhaps Selina hadn’t been in the business long enough to get into actressy ways. After years spent “resting” or taking jobs not much better than an extra’s, she’d auditioned for the part of Annabel, the licensee of the Crown and Anchor in Streetwise, never expecting to get it or if she did that the serial would run and run, be still running after fourteen years, and its four stars become more famous than actors who had been on the stage for a lifetime.