Alix and Brian have a new and by their standards rather expensive car, purchased from the legacy from Alix’s parents. They are pleased with it and enjoy driving it and sitting in it. The death of Alix’s parents had brought them more than a 1930s tea set and an old wardrobe and an embroidered tablecloth and a string of pearls, it has also brought them a share of the sale of the Bowen bungalow which Dottie and Dolly had wisely purchased well in advance of their eviction from the tied Deputy Master’s Lodge. It had not appreciated as spectacularly as the Bowen house in Wandsworth, but it had appreciated nevertheless, and Alix, John and Jenny had done well from the scrupulously fair three-way divide of the spoils. The Doddridges and the Bowens may not approve of the new property-owning democracy, and they may not think capitalism the dream system to end all systems, but they cannot help profiting. The shabby fin de siècle terrace house in Wandsworth, purchased for £9,000, is now said to be worth £300,000. Alix and Brian find this unlikely. But, of course, they do not sell.

‘I suppose,’ said Alix, dubiously, staring around her at unswept pavements, a de luxe fish and chip shop, a teenage mother wheeling two babies in a keeling balloon-topped double push chair, an old man with a Tesco plastic bag rifling through the contents of a garbage bin, and her wealthier fellow-citizens yawning or tapping angrily at their expensive car wheels, ‘I suppose I’d rather be sitting here stuck in this car than sitting stuck on a bus or down the tube. I’m beginning to think public transport is a lost cause. Do you think the Labour government will be able to rescue it?’

‘I doubt it,’ says Brian, who has become more realistic of late, and who is not in the mood to discuss transport subsidies.

‘I mean,’ says Alix, ‘in the old days, when the Northam buses were almost free, I suppose I used to go on them more often?’

Brian does not answer, and Alix lets the subject drop. She is not very interested in it either.

They inch forward. Ahead, the lights are dead. Lucky they are not in the old Renault, which would have overheated by now.

‘Do you think,’ says Alix, starting off on another track, ‘that by the year 2000 they’ll have settled the Cambodian question? Will we be able to go and scatter Stephen’s ashes at Angkor Wat? That would be a good way of celebrating the millennium.’

‘Stephen hasn’t got any ashes,’ says Brian.

‘Well, we could scatter something,’ says Alix, unperturbed. ‘I’d quite like to see Angkor, wouldn’t you?’

‘Not much,’ says Brian.

They both laugh.

‘Now,’ says Alix, you’ve got to promise to enjoy yourself, at Queyssac.’

‘I promise,’ says Brian. And he means it. The Dordogne, he can take.