It came to me that my mother was proud of her friendship with this high-spirited outcast, and I felt resentment as I thought of my own upbringing, of the fuss when my school reports weren’t all that my mother would have wished, of the scene when once I had sworn. My mother is a hypocrite, I thought incredulously. Then I forgot about it as the carrots boiled over. But already Lili had added a new dimension to my view.

‘And how is Syl?’ asked Lili over dinner.

This, too, astounded me. Syl was more of my mother’s generation than my own but it had never occurred to me before that he and she and Lili must all have been young at the same time. I realized that until recently I had thought very little, had taken life at face value, as though, until I was born, nothing on the earth had moved.

My mother, it seemed to me, looked shifty. She said, ‘Syl’s fine.’ She added, ‘He’s very good to Margaret,’ and I felt that simultaneously she had nodded towards the past while affirming the present and that I had fallen somewhere between the two: nothing but the body of a ghost, nebulous and deserted.

‘Is he still as good-looking?’ asked Lili.

Again I was astonished, for Syl was hard and red and, as I had just realized, old.

‘It seems like for ever since we were last here. Hasn’t he changed at all?’

Lili looked sideways at me and then away. I thought it the gesture of someone who has noticed a fellow human being about to step in something horrible but who is too polite to draw attention to the fact by seeming sorry for her. I didn’t yet know Lili.

‘He plays games,’ said my mother. ‘Keeps himself in trim.’

‘Hmm,’ said Lili, mashing a carrot.

‘Prime of life,’ said my mother, sounding to my ears defensive.

‘But of course,’ said Lili. ‘Aren’t we all?’

Not I, I thought. And not you, Mother.

Then Lili laughed and seemed to gleam with deathlessness and, I thought, the pride of life. Then I remembered, the lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh, and thought of the quiet convent and cool water.

‘Egypt,’ my mother was saying; ‘tell Lili what you thought of Egypt.’

I said, ‘It was very nice.’

Lili laughed again. ‘She has the right instincts,’ she said. ‘She is too polite to bore us with a travelogue.’

She lit a cigarette and asked what I had thought of Marie Claire.

I said I had found her very kind.

‘She was always kind at school,’ said Lili. ‘She used to share her sweets, but I never thought she had the sense of a hen.’

‘She was cleverer than all of us,’ protested my mother. ‘Top of the class.’