Of course, Kate did not really have the pick, the sense of choice was retrospective. At the time she was far too humble to ask for anything but tolerance. She was frightened of the others, though she wouldn’t admit it; she was even frightened of Danny, thick though he was, and easily fooled. The few times she opened her mouth she bitterly regretted it: once she pointed to a new object standing in the array on the deal table, a green jug with a clear glass handle and a pattern of white spots—“That’s nice,” she said, not even much meaning it, and Hunt looked up from his tea and drooped his lidded eyes at her and sneered over his big parrot nose and said in his most hoity-toity punishing tone, “Really, child, I see you have an unerring eye for the crap.” Kate flinched, perhaps she even blushed: crap was a word not as widely used then as it is now, at least to or by girls, and to hear it in such refined accents was peculiarly painful. On another occasion, she trod accidentally on a wooden Noah’s Ark, and broke it (it was hard to avoid treading on things in Highbury New Park): she started nervously to apologise, but was cut short by Hunt’s savagely polite “Stow it, Katie: just trample on the cheap stuff, will you?”

He was also unkind about her appearance in a way that she found hard to take. Objects which passed as desirable or stylish at Romley Fourways were scorned: a new plastic pink hangbag from Boots was held up for ridicule, and Hunt wheezed with cruel mirth at her black elastic belt and tight black cotton sweater. “We know you’ve got tits, Katie,” he said, “but try to let us forget it, won’t you?” In a despair of uncertainty, she took to going round in her old navy school-uniform skirt and blue-striped blouse, which passed without comment for some weeks until Hunt said, this time not unkindly, “Going to wear those for the rest of your adult life, sweetie?”

Why did she put up with it? Because, she says, she deserved it. The pink plastic bag was horrible, and so were the black belt and sweater: as soon as he pointed at them, she wondered how she could ever have thought them smart. Hunt was right. She would have to try again. But where to begin? There were no women hangers-on to imitate, apart from a strange ugly person who wore sandals, a dirty grey flannel skirt, a flowered blouse, and a cloak, and Kate did not want to look like that. She could see that she could choose to be a freak, but chose not. In the end, she found a new uniform: trousers and one of Peter’s school football jerseys. These passed inspection, and she lived in them until she got her nerve back. By then, everybody else seemed to be wearing trousers and football jerseys, and she blended into the background: Hunt never commented on her appearance again, though a year later he gave her a present—a long thin limp old silk scarf, with slanted ends and a black border and a small geometric pattern of green, beige, and white checks and diamonds, a scarf from the thirties, which smelt faintly of age and old-fashioned facepowder and cats and sawdust. She treasured this strange badge of approval, this pledge of womanhood, and still tends to favor small checks: in fact, the only successful evening dress she ever bought was an unconscious imitation of this scarf, a long rayon dress covered in tiny triangles of green and pink and brown. She has got the upper hand with Hunt now, but she recognises her debts.