“No, neither did I,” I said, looking round for some confirmation of my children’s existence and finding none but The Tale of Peter Rabbit under my chair. I bent down, picked it up and placed it conspicuously on the arm of the settee. “They’ve gone for a walk in the park,” I said, “with the girl.”

“You must have been married for a long time,” she said, and I laughed, and said:

“Oh yes, years and years and years.”

Then we were silent once more, and looked at each other. I was already beginning to worry because there was nothing for tea, and for what occasions but this should one always have a cake in the cupboard? When we reopened conversation we talked about what we had each done since we had left school: how she had gone to London University, not that she particularly wanted to at first, but because her father had insisted, and had got a good degree in history and had then done a Diploma of Education and taught for a year or two in a good girls’ boarding school in the North of England; how I had gone to Italy and lived in London and done nothing at all. I did not dare to tell her about my aspirations towards glossy photographs and television screens. I could see now, in the cool useful light of her eyes, how paltry, vain and valueless all such desires truly were, being nothing but an extension of that undergraduate longing for notoriety and disruption with which I had alienated her so many years before. She did say, at one point:

“I always thought you would go to university after that year abroad, you were always so good at the things you liked doing.”

But I could not take it upon myself to explain why I had not bothered to go. It did cross my mind as we talked that our lives had turned out quite neatly upside down: she was to have had the early marriage and the children, I was to have had the independent and faintly intellectual career. I wondered what had turned us over: ourselves, the world or accident.

Mary also touched, quite quietly, just as I was thinking that I would have to go and produce from nowhere some tea, upon the subject of my mother.

“I never heard,” she said, “what happened about your mother. I saw Sylvia just before she left London, and she didn’t know either.”

“Oh, she died,” I said. “Four years ago, just before I was married.”

“Oh? I am sorry to hear that,” said Mary, unruffled, but tender and sincere. “I really am sorry. But after all that time it must have been something in the way of a happy release.”

“Oh yes,” I said briskly, “it was a blessing in disguise, no doubt about it.” And then I wished that I hadn’t, because she blushed, and looked confused, and said: