At the time, however, Kate, like the other girls, chafed against restrictions, talking in class, picked up one or two O Levels with not very good grades—she was always good at English, but not at anything else—and found herself, by the age of sixteen, with not much idea of what she wanted to do next. She wanted to leave school, and indeed there was no sixth form to move into; the odd late-developer got shuffled off to the Girls Grammar School in Pinstead. But nobody seemed to care much what she did when she left. In those dark days, there were no Careers Officers, no Sixth-Form Colleges, no Colleges of Further Education. Miss Bates did suggest a nice job with British Home Stores, with opportunities for training, but Kate didn’t fancy that. For by this time Kate had realised that she was highly ambitious, that she’d no intention of wasting her life hanging around in Romley running errands for an agoraphobic mother. She didn’t yet wish she’d worked harder at school, felt not a flicker of envy for poor Peter, who was swotting away at a failed Physics A Level, but she did realise she was going to have to do something about herself. Little waves of panic swept through her as she sat in the evening during her last term watching What’s My Line on television while her mother munched her way through boxes of licorice allsorts. What should she do, get a job in the West End, get a job in a coffee bar, get a job in the local chemist’s? Become a sheep’s-head trimmer, like the lady on the screen, at whom Isobel Barnet was smiling with such chilling charm? She leafed through her mother’s copies of Woman and Woman’s Own, wondering what life was really like in offices, in hairdressing salons, in canteens and department stores. She read with attention the narrative advertisements for Horlick’s and Lifebuoy soap, she tried to guess which twin had the Toni, she imagined herself as a housewife polishing her furniture to a high gloss with O-Cedar polish or Mim cream. She imagined herself slender and elegant in a Spirella corset, handfitted; matte-faced in Charles of the Ritz powder, individually mixed. None of these images seemed very convincing, and she knew from June Barnes, who’d left the year before and got a job in a local estate agent’s office, that offices, at least in Romley, were shabby, draughty, full of hardboard partitions and missing stair rungs and boring men who never asked one out to dinner or a drink like they do in the magazines, and who would have been a dead loss if they had. Yet she went on reading the magazines and watching the telly, for something in her was entranced by the gap between fantasy and reality: the happy endings to the stories of those who found love because they learned about BO in time, who became ballerinas because they discovered hand cream (yes, hand cream), who were promoted to manageress status because they started to drink Horlick’s, filled her with a profound and mysterious satisfaction.