‘Oh, God,’ cried Dick disgustedly. ‘I thought all this sort of balls went out with button boots!’

‘That’s as far as I’ve got at the moment,’ said Rowe, as Goldwasser laid the manuscript down.

‘Nice,’ said Goldwasser.

‘No, seriously, tell me what you think of it.’

‘Very nice.’

‘Be more specific.’

‘Well, I just think it’s, well, nice.’

‘No, come on. Be frank. Don’t be afraid of hurting my feelings.’

‘All right. I think it’s very forthright.’

‘Forthright?’

‘I mean, the action raging back and forth between forthright discussion of the pros and cons of premarital intercourse and forthright horseplay among the suspenders and shoulder-straps. I liked the idea. It’s very – well, it’s very forthright.’

‘I’m glad you think that. I must say I think it is real life.’

‘And the language is very – well, very forthright, isn’t it?’

‘I think so. And pretty fresh, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, very fresh. Fresh without being offensive, I thought. It did away with all those rather provocative overtones the subject sometimes has.’

‘Well, yes . . .’

‘And the portrayal of character is marvellous. What happens in the end?’

‘Well, Patrick . . .’

‘No, I can guess. Patrick gets tight at a party. Annie gets him on his own in the bedroom, and keeps on and on at him, and finally he has to give in because he’s too exhausted to go on struggling.’

‘No, you see . . .’

‘So she makes him take off his cloak of facetiousness, and all his saucy under-facetiousness, and has her way with him – makes him speak two straight words one after another. It’s painful for a moment, but once it’s over he’s rather glad.’

‘I take the point, Goldwasser, but . . .’

‘Annie enjoys a moment of intense pleasure, of course. But it was chasing him back through all those layers of gangling verbiage that she really enjoyed. It’s a sad story, Rowe, but I have to admit that it has the salty savour of real life.’

18

There were now thirty committees, and between them they had gone approximately thirty times as far towards planning an informal occasion that She would like as one of the committees would have done on its own. When individual members stopped to think about it, they were sometimes a little surprised at exactly how far they had gone. It would not have occurred to any of them individually that what She would like would be to have all the gentlemen’s lavatories boarded up, but to the committees this had been transparently obvious. If Rowe, say, or Goldwasser, had been making the plans in their capacity as Rowe or Goldwasser it would not have struck them that the occasion would scarcely be a truly informal one unless twelve hundred square feet of turf were hired and laid down in the asphalt courtyard for the afternoon to turn it into an informal garden. But to the committees this went without saying.

The more Goldwasser thought about it, the more surprised he was at the corporate effect produced by Macintosh, Rowe, Riddle, and Haugh, who after all formed an effective majority of the committees’ membership. The more Macintosh thought about it, the more surprised he was at the corporate nature of Haugh, Riddle, Rowe, and Goldwasser. Rowe, Haugh, and Riddle entertained similar astonishment.