They were drinking China tea with lemon, in Lydia’s room; sitting cross-legged on her unmade bed, in a crumpled scarlet silk kimono, her eyes painted with kohl, she waved a cigarette about between her fingertips in the affected way she had, puffing at it superficially. Lydia could make Christine feel very unworldly. She was unworldly in those days: tall and thin and oblivious, with a rope of light brown hair coiled round her head like a caricature of an old-fashioned lady scholar, though she was only twenty-two; she rode an old bicycle round everywhere, with her books in the front basket, kicking off with one foot from the pavement then sitting very upright on the saddle, almost comically upright, in the dense London traffic. Christine had grown up in London, she was perfectly at ease in the city, yet she lived there somehow as if she was in exile from a more stately, slower world. There was something virginal about her, although she wasn’t literally a virgin. Lydia envied her friend’s calm self-possession: she couldn’t ride a bike, couldn’t imagine ever making her way so unprotected and trusting through the city traffic.

— So what’s his wife like? Christine asked, concerned.

— One of those miniature doll-bodies, dyed black hair, parchment skin, nervous. I should think she was a child-bride. Juliet by name, Juliet by nature. Apparently she’s an actress. Going out of her mind looking after the kid all day while Alex writes his poetry.

— Does he write poetry?

— He has a book of poems coming out. He’s a genius of course.

Lydia never hesitated when she was pronouncing judgements in her flat, hard little girl’s voice – though afterwards she would laugh at herself, at her own excesses. The friends had felt such relief at finding each other’s irony when they first met at their girls’ grammar school – each had feared she was the only unbeliever. Lydia doubted everything. It was almost a disappointment to Christine that Lydia had fallen heavily in love at last: it had always been the boys who pursued her, while she kept aloof. And Alex wasn’t supposed to be Lydia’s type – she had claimed that she hated intellectuals, so awkward and so self-important. Her boyfriends until now had been the pretty boys she met in clubs, or at the bar where she worked: lithe and skinny, with bleached hair or wearing eye make-up, hard and dangerous. When these boys took furtive calls on the house phone, monosyllabic or coaxing, Christine thought they might be dealing drugs. She had kept herself apart from this aspect of Lydia’s life – not because she disapproved of it, but because she was shy, and afraid that the boys would despise her plummy accent, her good manners.