Oldies! You should have seen them. Or at least you should have seen Rabika Flatman. She’d just come back from a couple of weeks in Honolulu without her husband and she was even blacker than she used to be when she was wont to swing in her garden hammock and I was wont to watch her from a bent position at my bedroom window. She was still twinkling from the good time she’d had. I guessed that she had frolicked on the beaches in just the bottom half of her bikini, and that she had scampered laughing up the trunks of palm trees pursued by native boys. She looked as though she’d eaten well, too, while she’d been away. Guavas and mangoes and paw-paws. There was a little sway (I won’t say sag) of surplus flesh – burnt flesh – on her upper arms, that I couldn’t take my eyes off as I talked to her. And her calves, pushed up and out by her silver strappy high-heeled sandals were a touch plumper than usual also. If she’d been a guava herself she’d have been declared a touch over-ripe – that’s to say perfect.

‘No Sharon?’ she asked me.

‘Out of sorts,’ I said.

‘What, too much of the hard stuff?’

I wondered how she knew. ‘That more or less gets it,’ I said.

‘Well my old man will be disappointed. He always likes to see her. He thinks she’s a corker.’

‘Sharon?’

‘Oh yes, he’s mad about her.’

My mind raced to the possibility of organizing a swap before it remembered to race back again to the possibility that I had nothing left to swap with. It was just my luck. Why hadn’t she mentioned her husband’s infatuation the last time that I saw her? In the days before Fitzpiers.

However, I wasn’t going to let that prevent me from showing some gallantry. ‘That makes two of us,’ I said.

‘Well, I should hope you are mad about your wife,’ said Mrs Flatman.

She hadn’t understood. ‘I mean if he’s mad about mine, I’m mad about his,’ I corrected her.

She still hadn’t quite perceived me. ‘His what?’ she asked. As my mother used to tell us, Rabika Flatman was not Marghanita Laski exactly. Not that that had ever worried me. I’d never seen Marghanita Laski swinging from the crossbar of her hammock.

But I’m prepared to admit that she might have been an easier person to pay a compliment to. I persevered with Rabika Flatman though. ‘Mrs Flatman,’ I said – I had never in all the years I’d known her had the courage, or come to that the desire, to call her Rabika – ‘Mrs Flatman, whatever Mr Flatman thinks of Sharon is nothing to what I think of you. I’ve been crazy about you ever since I was a little boy.’