— I’m too unsophisticated to love it, Lydia said. — I hate it. It makes me want to die. Except that I might wake up in an afterlife which looked just exactly the same. How would we even know that we were dead?

— Alex doesn’t believe in progress anyway, said Christine.

— Oh Alex, don’t you? Believe me, it was progress when I got to stop living in a place that smelled of other people’s beer and cigarettes.

He was only faintly amused, opening up Tibs’s newspaper from yesterday which he’d found folded under the bar counter. Alex preferred to get his news from the enemy. He believed you risked banality if you only read to confirm your prejudices – though there wasn’t much news of any sort in Tibs’s paper.

— Don’t you think Alex’s pessimism is so mid-century? Christine said. — So Central European. He can’t adapt. But I say, let’s shake off all the horrible old burdens! Why must we always be expecting the worst?

— Because the worst mostly happens? he suggested, not looking up.

— Not always, though. It doesn’t always. Things sometimes change for the better, you know: anaesthetics for instance. Or antibiotics, or flush toilets. The end of the Cold War! You’ve got to have something to believe in, Alex!

— Why?

She displayed him triumphantly to Lydia. — You see?

— Something’s always lost though. Even in the end of the Cold War.

— Nothing good was lost! Really, was it?

He thought about it. — Something crabbed and cobwebby and disenchanted. I hated that crabbed thing in my father. Yet it was also very ambitious, very purely intellectual. We may come to think that those dissident Central European cultures were the last to keep a classical ideal alive, an ideal of disenchantment.

Christine was watching him closely, and she spoke with sudden sympathy. — Oh, yes, I can see that, I can see what you mean.

— But most people wanted Adidas trainers more than they wanted classical ideals, Lydia said.