I had promised to go round the shops looking for something suitable, since my mother had shown that she wished to accompany me. I had said that I would find it easier on my own and she had been hurt, for normal mothers and daughters went together on this expedition, lunching in a department store and discussing the newly acquired contents of the carrier bags that lay at their feet. My trousseau had been taken care of already—underwear, nightgowns and some light dresses for my honeymoon. I had said that we should go to Egypt for this, not believing that the occasion would ever really arise; that I should be married to Syl and taken to the country in which I had come to life and lost it. My perversity had seemed to me amusing. I didn’t even realize how unhappy I was, as the wounded suffer merciful shock.

‘You are such a lump,’ said my mother ill-temperedly. ‘You don’t enjoy anything.’

‘Pity she couldn’t get her clothes in Cairo,’ said Lili

‘She didn’t think of that,’ said my mother.

‘She didn’t know then she was going to get married,’ said Lili—on the face of it reasonably.

But I had thought I was, though not to Syl. Not to Syl. By now I was past weeping.

‘Why aren’t you seeing Syl this evening?’ asked my mother, who knew.

‘He has to see a man,’ I reminded her tonelessly.

Now my mother did something rather risky. She said, at the end of her patience, ‘Don’t you love Syl?’

And I said smoothly that of course I did, for I wasn’t going to be inveigled into an emotional uproar.

‘Love?’ said Lili sardonically. ‘What’s love?’

‘I thought you knew,’ said my mother. ‘I thought you were the expert.’

Lili must also have realized that here was thin ice: thin ice over deep waters.

‘I know absolutely nothing about it,’ she said airily, dismissing the subject.

My mother looked dissatisfied, but I switched off my bedroom light and we were moving downstairs towards Robert and the tray of Martinis.

Tea with Syl’s mother was a taxing experience. She had a little pug-like dog who wore an expression of perpetual outrage, its eyes bulging as though someone had just said something unforgivable to it. She and this animal treated each other with mutual contempt, like an old unhappily married couple, and I always thought that the only reason he didn’t bite her or she have him put down was that they disliked the rest of the world even more than each other and would have been even more miserable and lonely than they were in their trap of hostility.

‘Cootchy, cootchy, coo,’ said Lili to the dog. She had insisted on coming with me to refresh, so she said, her memory of that ghastly old trout. Syl’s mother was highly displeased to see her and made a great to-do of fetching an extra cup, saucer and plate, worrying aloud that there wouldn’t be enough for three of us to eat.