The Armstrongs adopted Kate as protégée, and she responded to their attention by learning fast. She never learned to tell a good painting from a bad one, but at least she learned to look. She still enjoys cooking adafina, one of Luisa’s favourite Portuguese recipes (though I fear she gave up on chopped fish long ago). Unlike Hunt, the Armstrongs never made her feel silly and ignorant, though she knew she was; she must have sensed, she now thinks, that the easist way out of the mistakes and embarrassments of a lower-middle-class life style was not upwards into the middle classes, but out as it were sideways, into a kind of comfortable uncompetitive Bohemia. The Armstrongs were unshockable, and they enjoyed Kate’s tales of Romley. When her marriage to Stuart failed, Kate went through a phase of rejecting the whole Armstrong family, trying to read back into their acceptance of her all kinds of sinister motives, recognising that Michael’s ideas, which had once seemed so original, were in fact to be found in any old copy of the New Statesman, that Luisa’s histrionics could be tedious and childish, and that the house, even by Kate’s own rather low standards, could do with a touch of Woman’s Own spit-and-polish (was it really necessary to let the cat sleep on the breadboard next to the communal hairbrush, and the mice it failed to catch scamper along the dresser shelves during supper?)—but her attempts to dismiss them failed; there was a lot wrong with the Armstrongs, bat there was also a lot right with them, their warmth was real, not merely a display, and Kate owes to them the ease with which she embraces her own children and colleagues, the liberality of her own endearments: they taught her an emotional style, and she is grateful. They remain genuinely fond of Kate—in fact, too fond by half, she sometimes thinks, as she gets landed with yet another niece or nephew, or forks out yet another small loan to an indigent ex-brother-in-law. But she owes it to them, for they launched her.

It was Stuart’s elder brother Alex who decided that Kate ought to chuck her job with the photographer and try for something better. She had confided, one evening, her passion for women’s magazines. Alex had a friend who worked for IPC who had a friend who might be looking for a secretary. Kate took a crash course in shorthand and typing, got the job, learned as she went along, and, in brief, prospered. Her career was in fact almost as sensational as those sketched in the Horlick’s advertisements, though the reasons for her rise were a little less edifying: her boss, a thirty-year-old graduate alcoholic too fond of large lunches, was incapable of work in the afternoons, and came to rely rather heavily on Kate’s helping hand. Kate’s copy was brilliant, teetering on the brink between parody and sincerity, and after a while she ditched drunken Robert and got herself promoted, with what splendid results we all know. She worked her way through magazine editorial work, to features, to the secure position she now occupies, with a column of her own in one of the Sundays, and as much free-lance work as she fancies, at prices she or rather her agent can dictate.