‘Anyway, I told Lucy that a friend was giving a party in London and didn’t know any girls; that I’d put her on his list and thought that you might like to be asked.’

‘So she gave you my address in Norfolk.’

‘Yes.’

‘Was there a party?’

‘No.’

‘But you had my address . . .’

‘I had your address and I was about to write the letter but I put it off.’

‘Why?’

‘The summer holidays. I went to Greece.’

‘Why not write before you left?’

‘To make a date for September? It seemed too far off.’

‘So you went off to Greece . . .’

‘And when I got home I wrote the letter.’

‘Asking me out?’

‘Yes. I suggested that we meet up in London to have supper or go to a film. I wrote the letter at night, before I went to bed. I meant to post it the next morning.’

‘And?’

‘The next day I read The Times at breakfast.’

‘Ah. The Times.’

‘The Court Circular. Births, deaths, marriages and engagements. Your engagement. To Beresford. You had been taken off the shelf.’

‘So you never sent the letter?’

‘I tore it up.’

‘A pity.’

‘Why?’

‘You might have been a reason not to marry Beresford.’

‘I was still very young.’

Judith nodded. ‘Beresford was older.’

‘How much older?’

‘Ten years.’

‘Thirty. A grown man.’

‘Yes. And you were?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘Too young to marry.’

Yes. I had had little . . . experience.’

Judith smiles. ‘You were not part of the sexual revolution?’

‘Later. When I went to live in London.’

‘Sowing your wild oats?’

‘You might call it that.’

‘Though that phrase,’ says Judith, taking Jomier’s empty plate, placing it on hers, then passing both to Ruth, ‘dates from long before the 1960s.’

‘From the nineteenth century?’

‘The eighteenth. So one can’t blame Freud or D. H. Lawrence or Havelock Ellis for the breakdown of traditional morality because the sowing of wild oats went on long before Freud or Lawrence or Havelock Ellis – indeed, one might say it is a constant of human nature.’

‘Among young men.’

‘Yes. Among young men. The real change that took place in the 1960s – I mean what was radical and quite different from anything that had taken place before in human history – was precisely the fact that, thanks to the pill, girls could, and did, scatter their wild oats without having to worry about getting pregnant –’

‘Or social stigma.’

‘Or social stigma. Because, while it was always thought that social stigma was a by-product of Christian morality, it was in fact a social construct. Bastard children had to be paid for by the parish.’

‘But you –’ Jomier begins.

‘I was born three years too soon.’

‘No wild oats?’

‘A few snogs and fumbles.’

‘Necking.’

Judith laughs. ‘Yes, necking. And then marriage.’

‘Which didn’t last.’

‘No. But it might have lasted if I’d married ten years later.’

‘After more than a few snogs and fumbles.’