Chapter 14: Louise and Stella - The Golden Hours

PART TWO: NEW YEAR’S EVE 1963–SUMMER 1964

‘I suppose it’s good that it’s not all snowed-up like last year,’ Louise said, from the kitchen table where she was trying to write something. ‘At least you can leave the house.’

A whole year had passed since they’d made the centaur and the ballerina, since she’d complained to Clary about Joseph wanting her to give up her job, since she’d realised that not only was she wasting the best years of her life on him, but she knew it. Ha! It’d be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. And, this whole year later, what had she actually done about it? She’d kept her job, gone for many dinners, had a lot of excellent sex, received yet more pretty jewellery, and smiled nicely when he told her his family Christmas plans.

‘New Year’s Eve is always dreadful,’ said Stella, who was squinting at her hair in the bathroom mirror. ‘There’s always this idea that one should be out somewhere glorious, at a dance or a club with chandeliers and a tottering pyramid of champagne coupes and a jazz band, and oh, I don’t know, fountains. Orchids. And Rudi Valentino should be handing you a glass and laughing, with his bow tie undone and his teeth twinkling. And you’re wearing bugle beads and dancing with your arms out, and there’s confetti off a balcony and beautiful people who smell of gardenia all wanting to kiss you and singing “Auld Lang Syne”. And if that’s not where you are, then you’re a terrible failure.’

‘You seem to be stuck in New Year’s Eve 1921,’ said Louise. ‘Surely at least it would be Marcello Mastroianni, or Paul Newman?’

‘Oh yes, you could be in Rome with Marcello, or by a log fire in a cabin with Rock Hudson,’ said Stella, coming in, still prodding her curls. ‘That would count. I’ve never quite understood cabins in America. Why they have them, and we have cottages.’

‘It’s probably something to do with bears,’ said Louise. ‘And so many of them being Russian and Polish. Where are you going, anyway?’

‘Mum and Dad’s, if I can make it through the not-that-bleak midwinter.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Louise. ‘What a dim and dispiriting prospect.’ Louise loved Stella’s parents. Otto was wonderfully warm and clever, and funny without having the slightest idea why or how he was. And Sophie was one of the only women Louise had ever met who quite simply adored her, with no side, no anxiety, no jealousy, no requirements. She simply thought Louise was wonderful. Straightforward affection went a long way with Louise. For Stella, of course, her parents were rather different.

‘What’s your mother cooking?’

‘Everything delicious,’ said Stella. ‘And she’ll force me to have two helpings of it all from stew and dumplings to apple strudel, or be branded an unappreciative daughter, and once I’ve eaten it she’ll tell me I need to lose weight if I ever want to get a husband.’ She broke into an appallingly accurate impersonation of her mother: ‘You’re so beautiful. That hair! Those green eyes like jade! And your beautiful English teeth, all that milk . . . but you need to lose the backside. Some of it. Learn the benefits of a well-cut blazer. And would it kill you to use lipstick? – and then she’ll cry, because I’m thirty-seven.’

Louise knew better than to laugh too much. A person’s mother is still their mother.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Stella. ‘Going anywhere?’

Louise had only just got back from Norfolk, and they hadn’t had time to talk. ‘I’m not feeling well actually. Going to stay in. And, you know –’ She glanced out at the dismally normal winter night, nothing like the previous year’s marvellous (and marvellously impractical) snow. She still wondered why, if Christmas was so special, God would so often let it look so drab.

If Stella was surprised, she didn’t show it. ‘If you don’t change your mind, and you’re still up, we can re-enact midnight when I get in,’ she said kindly. ‘Though I don’t know if I’ll last the whole evening anyway . . . perhaps I’ll see you later.’ Then, anxiously: ‘You don’t want to come, do you?’

Louise shook her head, quickly and carefully. Her tears were almost ready to fall and Stella was hard to deceive. ‘Have fun!’ Louise cried gaily. ‘Send them my love!’ as Stella tied her headscarf and pulled on her winter boots before heading for the narrow smelly stairs which led from their scruffy, beloved flat above the grocer’s down to the damp street.

Louise was not staying in. No. Alone at the kitchen table, she stared out at the view without a single tree in it. The street lights gave a cold glow to the mist, something odd and heartless about it. Like me, she thought. That’s what I have to be. In her head a voice from down the years spoke suddenly to her. It was Miss Milliment, her old governess – her mother’s old governess! Long dead, much loved. ‘Don’t use that kind of imagery, my dear,’ she said. ‘That is the pathetic fallacy, and while quite understandable it is rather cheap. You can do better.’

‘I’m not really writing, Miss M,’ Louise murmured. ‘I’m thinking. Planning. Trying to be brave and good.’ At which I have always been lamentably bad, she thought.

You can do better. Louise did not feel that she had done better. She had tried. Or at least she thought she had tried. She had not tried hard enough. How on earth can one know whether or not one has tried hard enough? By the results? Presumably.

This New Year, Joseph and his wife were in the Caribbean. On a boat. Lounging in inappropriate sunshine, having a marvellous time. She’d seen Joseph’s wife, from time to time, by mistake, and she would not look marvellous in a bikini. Stop it, she thought. Don’t be mean.

She had never spent Christmas with her lover of all these years. And this was the sixth New Year’s Eve in a row where there had been talk of their being together, and no togetherness had ensued. Each year she had this same insidious burst of anger, sorrow, loneliness, jealousy, guilt, shame, self-hatred and regret. And each year she fought through it, clinging to her instability, the sacrifices she had already made, her hope, her love. Each year she found herself more pathetic.

So, now? Fear of loneliness; fear of old age; fear of death. The sheer indignity of it. But the same things which had made her cling to him set her off, this new New Year, on the path of separation instead.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought about it – she thought about it every year. Some years she had even tried.

Was it to do with actually being forty? She wanted a home. Not a flat offered by somebody who wouldn’t be living in it with her. She wanted who she loved most to live with her, in her home. She wanted them to be there at night, and at weekends, and at Christmas. Even if it was Stella, or a spaniel, or just her own heart . . . She had been wanting everything for years from an unreliable and absent source, allowing herself to expect it, and lying to herself about the likelihood of ever getting it. It couldn’t go on. She was invested in bum stock, and she had to get out. One of her colleagues had recently quoted what she said was an ancient Japanese proverb: ‘If you get on the wrong train, the sooner you get off, the better. The longer you stay on, the more the return journey costs.’ Come to think of it, it couldn’t be that ancient.

She still had the letter she’d written years before, folded and faded at the bottom of her blue-lined jewellery box like a neglected promise. She went now and took it out.

Dear Joseph, she had written.

I have believed since the night we met that there is nobody I could love better than you, and I believe that still. But I have to love better. And that cannot be you. You know why.

New Year’s Eve is only a moment in the passing of the years, but I take the opportunity of fresh starts to tell you: I will no longer be the mistress of a married man. I will no longer be a blot on a marriage. I will no longer deny myself the chance of being loved fully, and solely. I have loved loving and being loved by you. But it has always been both too much and too little. And always will be, unless I end it. So it must be nothing.

Louise

Don’t come back to me with questions or comments or negotiations or pleas. Confirmation of receipt will put my mind at ease though. Please do me this favour.

For longer than her entire first marriage, she had been trying to leave this affair. The push-me-pull-you of it! Years of trying to persuade herself this way, or that, or this, or that. She was exhausted.

She wrote the letter out afresh, her hands actually shaking. She didn’t need to change a single word, which was pretty damn telling. Don’t call yourself pathetic, she whispered. You’re not pathetic. Love is a crippler. Just do it. Do better.

She folded the piece of paper, put it into a new envelope, wrote Joseph Waring: please make sure he gets this on the outside, and burst into tears. The last time she’d write his name. Oh for God’s sake!

It was going to be like bereavement. It was the right thing. It would take time. But she’d been training.

She knew he was away; knew she could leave it discreetly with the doorman. She belted her raincoat tight, picked up her umbrella and went down into the treacherous street.

The walk was about fifteen minutes, from Blandford Street to the grand white terrace on Regent’s Park where he still had his flat. She passed groups of revellers, to-ing and fro-ing between pubs and parties: wafts of scent, peals of laughter, huddled figures, furs clutched close, cigarettes glowing in hot points, breath hanging on the cold air. Steamed-up windows of pubs and restaurants; lights within, bursts of drunken talk. Women stepping off kerbs, clinging to the arms of their men.

As she walked back, picking her way across damp surfaces, she laughed a little, thinking of how Miss Milliment would have disapproved of her tears mingling with the sleet. Done, done, done, said the muffled echo of her heels on the pavement. She said the word out loud. Is it truer now? Or will it not be true until he’s back, suntanned and relaxed – until he reads it?

Oh God. She lurched. What if he rings her before he’s seen it? A genuine panic clutched her – but no. At work, she’ll tell Imogen not to put him through, and at home she simply won’t answer the phone. If it rings, she’ll – she’ll – go out! She’ll just run down the stairs! Screaming!

She went via Crawford Street, wondering whether to stop in at The Beehive for a gin and tonic, exchange seasonal goodwill with the bar staff and whoever was in. But she didn’t feel up to it. A glance through the door showed a world that was not hers tonight. That man’s world, that drunk world, that cheery world.

Back at home, she made her own gin and tonic, took it with her for a leisurely bath, and cried. Then, in pyjamas and dressing gown, she read for a while, and couldn’t concentrate. Pacing to and fro filled a few minutes. Regret clutched her – that didn’t take long, but fighting it off consumed some more of her time. This is what it’s going to be like, she told herself. Endlessly.

So she drew up a chair, and the notebook she and Stella used for telephone messages, and gave herself a clean page. This is all terribly symbolic, she thought. She wrote down: Michael. Hugo. Joseph. The three who in their different ways had been most important in shaping her life.

Then, Philip. That actor. The psychiatrist. Nigel. George. That photographer. That other photographer. The director. The assistant director. The writer; his friend. The taxi driver. It wasn’t a list of every man she’d slept with, or who’d kissed her or tried to, or chased her round a table or wilfully misunderstood a friendly gesture – that would take for ever! It was just the ones she had been upset about. Of course she wasn’t still upset about them. One gets over these things. She was absolutely a grown woman now, a woman of the world. Of course you blank a lot of it out. Every woman does.

Sometimes she felt that despite all the obvious blessings – good health, a decent family, not a bad brain, looks that she was happy to admit had given her an advantage in life and weren’t played out yet – somehow something was stacked against her. Perhaps I am too old now to attract that kind of attention any more, she thought, and genuinely couldn’t tell if that was a relief or terrifying. I am on the shelf, she whispered to herself, trying it out. No more glamorous little work trips to Paris, no more quiet, intense diners à deux, no more running down the stairs when she heard the unmistakable rumble of a London taxi drawing up outside. It shouldn’t be but oh God it was terrifying. She remembered, almost with shame, the moment she had told her mother not to worry about her any more because she had a rich lover now. And that had been enough. But all the way through she had been longing for him to leave his wife. Pretending. And he had never actually said that he would. So she was the perfect cliché of the self-deluded Other Woman. Like her father’s Diana. That Woman, Villy called her. The Destroyer. Like some Abyssinian lion goddess.

It’s my dignity, she thought. My dignity can’t stand for it. Waiting about, to be a Destroyer, a That Woman.

Her father had said to her once, it’s easier to have a mistress than to be one. She had felt a terrible hollowness, that she was as cheap as her father had always been. And at the same time a sweet sense of community with him: in the gutter together. And then: I’m the kind of woman my father would have made a pass at. And then came the memory of her father that she had chosen, long ago, to bury. Of course one can’t just turn one’s unconscious mind on or off, or one’s conscience. You can’t forget to order. Shut up, memory! Well, she’d buried it all as best she could. How it was unwise to be alone with him if he’d had a couple of cocktails. The girls called it WHT: wandering hand trouble. Though she wasn’t aware of anybody else having it from their own father. Other people’s fathers, yes. But nobody would ever say anything to the girl concerned. And the girl concerned couldn’t say anything to herself, when it was her own father. Or to anybody else. So you just arrange never to be alone with him. Because you love him.

Oh, stop thinking about that! You’ve made your move. You can hold your head up now. You’re building your new life, as of now, unencumbered, free, hardworking, independent. 1960s Louise. Grown-up Louise. No more estimating yourself as second best. No more waiting. You can do better.

‘All right, Miss M,’ she said.

‘What?’ said Stella, coming in the front door, dripping, and carrying more than she went out with.

‘Talking to myself,’ said Louise.

‘The best kind of conversation,’ said Stella.

‘Talking to oneself, or talking to me?’ Louise asked.

‘Both!’ said Stella. ‘What were you talking about?’

‘I was telling my old governess, Miss Milliment, about my plans to do better with myself. For myself,’ Louise said.

Stella, always in favour of this, perked up. Louise knew that Stella felt Louise had integrity but low standards of behaviour.

‘How?’ Stella asked.

The deed is done, Louise thought. No going back. Might as well tell her.

‘I’ve left Joseph,’ she said. ‘In writing. Asking him not to contact me again.’

Stella gaped. Of course she doesn’t believe me, Louise thought. We’ve talked about it all so often, and to so little effect, over such a long period.

Still, Stella didn’t dare say ‘About time too’. Louise knew why. For all Stella knew, Joseph might be back on the menu by next week.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Stella said instead.

‘Yes,’ said Louise. ‘No. Perhaps.’

‘It’s not yet midnight,’ Stella said. She turned to the fridge and produced a bottle of champagne. ‘Celebration? Commiseration?’

Louise looked up. ‘Yes?’ she said. Her voice was watery. ‘And we need to move house,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay here. It should really be all change. Fresh start! We should buy somewhere. Perhaps even together. Why not? Would you?’

Stella turned again to the fridge, where she took slightly too long to find whatever it was she was looking for.

‘I’d love that,’ she said, into the salad drawer, ‘but I don’t see how we could.’

‘We’re both working,’ said Louise. ‘And I’ve been saving. You know I wouldn’t let him set me up –’ she paused and took a big breath – ‘but we could get a mortgage. I can talk to the bank.’

‘Louise, they don’t give mortgages to women,’ Stella said, turning.

‘Don’t they? Why on earth not?’

‘Because they think we don’t work, because they won’t let us have most jobs, and if we do they don’t pay us enough, and if we do work, we’ll leave when we get married, because they make us, and we’ll be depending on some man anyway, so they might as well just give the mortgages to the men in the first place.’

‘But –’ Louise said, then realised there was no point arguing the case for women who didn’t slot neatly into this with Stella, as Stella hardly made the rules. And Stella wasn’t slotted in either. ‘Well, we could rent somewhere a bit nicer?’

It wasn’t just distraction. Suddenly it was terribly important. She wanted a garden. Pots of dying thyme in a window box could satisfy for only so long. She wanted to see a tree out of her window! She’d always wanted that. ‘I went down to see Clary and Zoë the other day,’ she said, ‘and you know they have acres, reaching off into the dim distance, mostly full of Georgie’s animals but still, you know, apple trees. Blossom! She’s got two crab-apples and in April it’s like a Samuel Palmer painting out there.’

‘But you’d hate it. We need to be in town,’ said Stella, which they did. Working girls and all that.

‘I don’t mean Mortlake. But perhaps, I don’t know, Kensington? Notting Hill? Or Maida Vale, up by the canal?’

Louise was remembering her grandmother’s house, where she had lived during the war and just after, when her husband Michael had been away at sea, after she’d escaped the bone-chilling loneliness of being a naval wife living in war-time port hotels. The sweet villa on Hamilton Terrace had been a kind of paradise. An ever-changing population of people had passed through, on leave, returning to duty, starting out, sharing rations, growing vegetables, playing music, sleeping on sofas. Sleeping with each other.

Was it the house, though? Or was it the being young? Or was it the individuals? Happiness is never a place, she thought, it’s the people you were there with, in that place, at that time. Michael’s cousin Hugo, at the piano, playing Bach, crackling with wit and sweetness. Hugo was the sweetest of all the ‘What Ifs?’ of youth. Dead now. Sometimes she felt that Michael and his mother had killed Hugo themselves.

Whoever lives in that house now, she thought, doesn’t know anything about us, and what we were when we lived there.

Louise was not someone who looked back, but throwing out your lover of nearly a decade was exactly the sort of thing to bring it on.

Stella was watching her with the eyes of long friendship and deep understanding. ‘That was a nice house,’ she said. Her brother Peter used to visit, on leave. He was living in Copenhagen now, working with the Danish Royal Opera.

She poured champagne into two of the coupes that had come from Home Place. They gleamed like a pair of crescent moons tip-tilting in the night sky. ‘Here you go,’ Stella said, passing one across.

Louise burst into tears: full-on shuddering weeping, head on the kitchen table, gasping, horrible crying, the threat of throwing up. Stella let her go on for a few minutes.

‘Darling,’ she said, pulling up a chair, sitting beside Louise. She put her hand gently to her friend’s head, pulled a few long silky locks back from her face. ‘Sweetheart, you’ve done the right thing. Of course it’s hard but you know it’s right.’

Louise threw her head up like a lion about to roar, her face screwed up, her eyes tight. ‘It’s not that,’ she gasped.

‘I know,’ said Stella.

‘What do you know?’ Louise gulped. ‘You always know. What?’

‘It’s not that you’ve left him, it’s that you took so long to do it and you feel you’ve wasted so much time.’

‘Hah!’ Louise cried, tears squeezing down her face. ‘Bingo!’

‘But there’s no such thing as wasted time,’ Stella said. ‘You’ve learnt. That’s all. You know now. You’re alive. On we go.’

‘Hah!’ Louise cried again.

‘And it’s not that you’re scared you’ll never attract another man; it’s that you wish you’d put more of yourself into your own life and less into thinking that a man can solve all your problems for you . . .’

‘Please never leave me,’ said Louise, and knocked over her glass. She reached under her watch-strap for her handkerchief, blew her nose, and rubbed at her eyes. ‘You wicked mind-reader,’ she mumbled into her handkerchief. ‘Dear beautiful Stella. You can stop now.’

As Stella refilled the glass, Louise thought: God, do I know all that? She wasn’t at all sure that she did.

* * *

It was so hard to see her friend in such pain. Stella had felt the rising level of Louise’s hysteria, and feared that she might exhaust herself, like a two-year-old, and not come down. Stella knew how battered a woman’s body could be by weeping. The last thing she ever wanted was to cause Louise pain.

Dear beautiful Stella had a secret, and this was most unusual. Stella was not the kind of woman to have a secret. For a start, there was so little to have secrets about. She’d never really had a boyfriend, and what other kind of secret was there, for a nice girl from a nice family? It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted one – well, she’d never particularly wanted any particular boy as her boyfriend, thank God, because that seemed to cause a lot of girls a lot of trouble. But girls were brought up to assume that they would want one. The pattern of a woman’s days was to depend on marriage. But she hadn’t had much opportunity to become interested in sex, because men were not very interested in her. Dear beautiful Stella was not, in her own eyes or those of the unforgiving world, beautiful. Women who, like her, had short legs and big bottoms, shapeless ankles and thin shoulders, did not qualify for mystery and romance. So many of a woman’s body parts have the power to disbar her from romantic expectation. For all her creamy skin, her cheekbones, and the lustrous black curls, let alone her intelligence, dry wit and big heart, Stella had from the day of her birth been chubby, plump, big-boned, ‘a bit of a lump really’. Perhaps it was glandular, said her mother, who had a twenty-six-inch waist she wasn’t satisfied with. It wasn’t glandular. Her father affectionately called her Podge and loved her whole-heartedly. Her mother was concerned. Stella learned young what a disappointment she was: the fitting of grey wool school coats and tunics, where anything big enough round the middle hung over her shoulders and came down way beyond her knees, and all the slender begirdled ladies standing around would sigh and frown and what was to be done about it. Stella was given her first girdle at ten. How it bit. She’d grown accustomed to clothes that were hard to pull on or do up, to sharp painful red lines in her flesh, there to chastise her for the failures of her own body. Perhaps it was puppy fat, her mother said. It will pass, her mother said. And it did pass, for a few years during the war, when rationing made her scrawny, yet still somehow lumpy, where society would have her smooth. Stella did find herself occasionally the object of a strange and confusing attention from such men as there were around. She was not familiar with it and didn’t wish to become so.

Louise on the other hand radiated a manner of airy and elegant distance which gave the impression of ease, though Stella knew it was in fact a frozen representation of charm covering a deeply hungry heart. Louise could cry behind her face; Stella knew when she was doing this. Stella watched as Louise thought she was in love, married, had her child, fell in love with her husband’s cousin, left her husband, and learned of her lover’s death. By twenty-three, Louise manifested as a fully qualified woman of the world, sophisticated, elegant, lost inside, embarking on love affairs and desperate to prove herself. Though to prove herself what, or to whom, wasn’t clear. Observing her friend, learning by proxy, Stella retreated even further from what she thought of as All That. When rationing began to scale down, her flesh began to scale up again, protecting her. For a while she thought she minded; then realised it wasn’t her who minded, it was her mother.

By her thirties, Stella was heavy-set, stocky, plus-size. On a good day, lush, or buxom. Voluptuous. But everybody knew that only vulgar men liked that in a woman. A lush woman was out of control, and it would only get worse. She’d thought a lot about why it was so wrong to be fat. Why not just be fat, if you were? What harm did it do? She worked it out: like being Jewish, or a woman, the problem wasn’t what you were, it was how other people treated you for being what you were.

The other reason Stella didn’t have secrets was that she was an open and upright person. She told Louise everything – at least everything that Louise might want to know about. This didn’t include anything to do with Stella’s work, which involved politics, and foreign travel to places which were neither picturesque nor glamorous nor, often enough, safe. ‘Going anywhere fun?’ Louise would say, meaning Paris or Rome or a pine-studded island, a fragrant beach, a yacht perhaps in deep-lit turquoise waters. Stella thought of the meeting rooms and long drab corridors where politicians gathered and she clamoured for attention with the rest of the press pack. ‘Not really,’ she said.

A month or so before Christmas, Stella had got back from a trip (Bonn, a conference on the possibilities of European collaboration on health research initiatives, fascinating but ultimately quite frustrating). Louise had been out somewhere, and Stella had very much wanted to let her hair down a bit: to drink a little red wine (she didn’t drink much) and talk nonsense for a few hours after a stressful time away. So she went to a party, given by a friend of a friend in a narrow house off Brunswick Square. When she arrived, alone and mid-evening, she could hardly get in for the throng of arty people and youngish journalists, smoking, wearing black roll necks, all talking at once. Miles Davis was on the record player and some French girls were dancing by the stairs. Stella squeezed up past them (one was wearing a delicious scent) in vague search of the friend. Someone had turned Miles up to full volume in the sitting room, and was singing along, so she took refuge in the tiny kitchen where she soon found herself chatting with a dark barrel-chested man, who was asking her a question. This was so rare – a man asking her a question – that she had to stop for a moment, to check if it was really happening.

‘What do you do?’ he was asking. ‘This may sound crass but I do think we might have met.’

‘Political journalist,’ she said. ‘I write for the Manchester Guardian, and some magazines.’ She waited for the usual response: something along the familiar line from patronising disbelief to ‘and what does your husband think about that?’, ending in a polite smile and slipping away.

‘International, or domestic?’ he was saying.

‘Both,’ she said, looking at him with new interest. He was not the ugliest man she’d ever seen, but it was liveliness, not beauty, that animated his potato face. Something a little twinkly, which suggested the ability to cut to the chase. Something jolly. ‘Mostly international,’ she said. ‘European co-operation. I just got back from Bonn today.’

‘I knew it!’ he said. ‘I saw you, at the press conference. You were asking a rather intelligent question but I can’t remember what it was.’

‘I didn’t get an answer, anyway –’

‘No, your colleagues are quite – vociferous, aren’t they?’

‘I have to yell, basically,’ she said. ‘And even then –’

‘Bloody physiognomy,’ he said.

‘And manners,’ she murmured.

‘Jonathan Mayer,’ he said.

‘Stella Rose,’ she said.

‘I don’t suppose you’re related to Dr Otto Rose?’ he said, and she paused a moment.

‘Yes’, she said. ‘My eminent papa.’

‘He taught me!’ he said. ‘Fabulous man. Is he, er, still with us?’

‘Yes, he is,’ she said.

‘Every Friday night?’ he said, with a leading look.

‘Culturally, but not religiously,’ she said, which cracked his face into a smile.

‘Thank God for that,’ he said, ‘or rather thank the rational impulses of the intelligent and educated human mind.’

Stella laughed.

‘Do you speak languages?’ he asked, slightly yearningly.

‘I do! French, German, bit of Italian. A smattering of Hungarian.’

‘Hungarian,’ he said happily. ‘An uncle from Budapest?’

‘Not so many uncles any more,’ she said, and he was silent. He glanced away and back.

‘Me too,’ he said. ‘Me neither.’ They kind of grinned at each other. Closed wide mouth, blinking eyes, a tension across the skin. The same mask.

‘So you’re –’

‘Ashkenazi,’ he said and she laughed. A burst of ‘A Night in Tunisia’ washed through the room as a group of younger men tried to pour in, shouting about the fridge, and falling over themselves to get to it.

‘I was going to say,’ she said, ‘an eye surgeon.’

One of the young men started to declaim, in a jazz manner.

‘That too,’ Mayer replied. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake – listen, Stella, you’re a cultured person, aren’t you, concerts, foreign films, that sort of thing?’ He took her by the elbow and drew her towards the window where things were a little calmer. ‘I have tickets for the Wigmore Hall on Sunday, Julian Bream, classical guitar. I believe he may be going to play some Villa-Lobos. Would you come with me? Otherwise I’ll have to take my mother and she hates Villa-Lobos and indeed the classical guitar but she’ll come if I ask, to please me, because she’ll think I want her to, though I really don’t, because she’ll look pained all the way through and then say “it’s lovely Jonathan” if I tell her I know she’s hating every minute, really, it’s quite exhausting, please save me from it. Will you? Does your schedule allow?’

Yes, it allowed.

Stella’s mother, Sophie, thought that Stella didn’t get it, and never had. And that it was impossible to tell her, in so many words, because that would make her self-conscious, and being self-conscious never did a girl any favours either, and if there was one thing Stella didn’t need, it was fewer favours. Stella’s mother felt that Stella needed all the favours she could get. But she wouldn’t take them, and it broke her mother’s heart.

Stella knew all this perfectly well: that her mother wanted to tell her what was best for her; to tell her, as a girl with – forgive me – a big backside, to lay off the pancakes. And as a clever girl, to tone it down. Oxford and Bletchley Park! Nobody doubted it. Of course Sophie was happy that Stella did those things. Proud. Sophie had told her so often that a woman needs something to fall back on, if her marriage goes wrong. ‘You could have come home after the war and been a librarian, a teacher.’ They’d all wondered if war really would change things, and they’d let Jewish girls be professors in England. But then, when things started to calm down again, and the Jews were in shock, everywhere . . . well, a lot of men don’t want a clever girl. Everybody knows that. They want a pretty girl; a cheerful girl, a practical girl, a sexy girl. Perhaps a girl who’d go to Israel with them, or America. But clever they’re scared of.

Being Jewish already made Stella’s pool of choice smaller. Clever, and the pool shrinks again. But there’s nothing a girl can do about being Jewish or clever, and she shouldn’t even if she could. But Stella did nothing about the things she could change. She didn’t have to be so . . . free, with her intelligence. She didn’t have to be so careless about her presentation. Just to give herself more chance of a good man, a nice man. That’s all! And then Stella would give her mother The Look, and her mother would say, ‘I didn’t make the world, Stella, it’s a wicked world and a girl needs a husband. What, you’re going to work? They won’t let you work! They keep the jobs for themselves. All right, so you’re educated. You want to live your own life? All right. And when it goes wrong, what are you going to fall back on? How are you going to pay for your chocolate bars when you’re still in the typing pool when you’re fifty? Sure, do these things, do everything you can, live your life . . .’

Factually, Stella knew more than Sophie did about what had happened. What had been done. Spit it out: what the Nazis did. It was only twenty years ago. Stella had got used to the fact that Sophie couldn’t speak of it, couldn’t think of it. Sometimes, she overheard her mother whispering the prayer for the dead, El Maleh Rahamim, naming those she knew, and there were enough of them. Stella knew her mother wasn’t religious, and nor was she, but when she heard this she too thought, as far as a human mind could, of the others, all of them. And kicking herself too because she didn’t believe in this either. She hadn’t been brought up to it. But still.

Sophie would say, ‘Beauty, used well, can protect you.’ And Stella would say, ‘I could be a doctor.’

And Sophie would say, ‘If you were just fat, or just a woman, or just Jewish, perhaps. Your father’s fat and Jewish and he’s done all right! But not all three.’

She’s pretty much given up on me now, Stella thought. She thinks of me as nearly forty and living in a rented flat with a woman she finds a conundrum: ‘Such a sweet girl, and such a glamour-puss, and why she has no husband I do not know.’

And here I am, Stella thought, no husband, no house, no children, running round the world doing politics. And Peter’s running round the world playing pianos, no wife, no house, no children. Who will we have to worry about, to look after us when we are our parents’ age, if we don’t have children? If we don’t have grandchildren, who will say prayers they don’t believe for all of us when we die?

He turned up for their date with a gift for her. A small megaphone, prettily wrapped and tied with a blue ribbon.

Well now, she thought.

She didn’t tell Louise for ages. So many reasons. Shyness. Not being convinced it would last. Being convinced it wouldn’t. Fear of Louise’s response – would she be sharp? Mocking? Dismissive? There was a kind of nervousness that it was her having the romance, not Louise, which had never happened in the history of time. Stella had the brains; Louise had the sex appeal. They both knew that. But now Louise had acquired, through experience, some brains, so why shouldn’t Stella be allowed some sex appeal?

And Louise was so sad about Joseph, even though she was being very dignified and disciplined.

But Stella didn’t want circumstance to manoeuvre her into having to tell – where Louise would wail, ‘But why didn’t you tell me?’ and she would have to say, ‘But I’m telling you now,’ or, ‘The time was never right.’ She had to make the time right. She had to be bold and purposeful. And time kept passing. So one spring evening, when the window was open for the first time that year, and voices rose up from the street below, Stella decided.

‘Louise,’ she said, perched beside her on the sofa. Louise was painting her toenails; an activity for which she had more time now than she used to. ‘I need to tell you something. I have a boyfriend.’

The tiny brush in Louise’s hand hovered.

‘Goodness,’ Louise said. ‘Who on earth is it? What do you mean?’

‘It is pretty new,’ said Stella.

‘Well clearly,’ said Louise, ‘if I don’t even know about it.’

Stella stumbled over her next words.

‘What?’ said Louise. ‘When did you meet?’

Stella confessed: it was not that recently. ‘Before Christmas,’ she said.

Louise lifted her head and looked directly at her friend. ‘Oh,’ she said. Not telling, for Louise, was not loving. Stella knew this and could see Louise was controlling the urge to feel left out.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,’ Stella said. ‘It’s that thing of not being sure that a thing really is a thing, and then by the time it is a thing it’s rather late – but it is a thing.’

‘Is he married?’ Louise said, and Stella had to bite her lip.

‘No, he’s not,’ she replied, and tried to keep her tone even. She might be thinking, I’m not you, Louise, but Louise didn’t need to know that.

‘It’s just that it’s so unusual, at our age, a single man . . .’

Stella couldn’t say anything. The way Louise was just slotting this romance, Stella’s romance, into her own cynical world of adultery and affairs, as if they were the same kind of woman, emotionally, romantically, sexually. This, she thought, might also be part of why I haven’t wanted to tell her.

It was something of a make-or-break moment. If she was going to be open, she had to be open right now.

‘I’d love it if you could just be happy for me, Louise,’ she managed. ‘Why – look, I’ve never introduced you to any boyfriend, never really had one, you know that, and now I do, and – and listen to you!’

‘Well, that’s exactly why, Stella,’ Louise returned. ‘I’m cautious for you . . .’

‘Well, don’t be. Be happy for me.’

‘Nobody should marry the first person they fall for,’ Louise said. ‘I of all people should know that . . .’

‘Louise! One, I’m not you –’

‘What’s that meant to mean?’

‘That I’m different to you?’

‘As in, what, you’re not a tart like me?’

‘That’s not what I said.’

‘It’s what you meant.’

How quickly this had all gone wrong! They paused, both of them. Swallowed, and regrouped.

‘Louise!’ Stella said. ‘You cannot put words in my mouth then tell me off for them. I don’t think you’re a tart. Well, you’re a tart for affection. And you’re so pretty you’re always being offered sex instead and you haven’t always known the difference. But you’re not – and I never, ever would –’

‘Oh,’ said Louise.

‘And two, we’re not talking about you. Because excuse me, after all these years of your love life, we are now finally talking about mine. I’m not marrying him. And if I were, well, I’m twice the age you were when you married. I’m practically at the other end of my life. Love-wise. And four – is it four? Look, I know I’m discreet, but . . . he’s not the first person I’ve fallen for.’

‘Really?’ said Louise. She had screwed the little nail polish brush back into the bottle, which she put aside now. ‘Who was?’

‘A boy at Oxford. I don’t think you met him. Listen, Louise, I’m not a virgin. I’ve tried once or twice to have a boyfriend but – well, you know all about my so-called love life! You were there half the time. Men like women who will be where they left them, and I never am. I’m always in Beirut or Venezuela or somewhere. Meeting warlords and communist priests, all kinds of people who won’t do. And no, I don’t want that for the rest of my life.’

Louise put her hand out.

‘So who is he?’ she said.

‘He’s called Jonathan Mayer.’

‘Jewish! Your parents will be pleased.’

‘Dr Jonathan Mayer.’

‘They’ll be over the moon!’

‘My father taught him.’

‘Oh blimey – the second coming! Is that how you met?’

‘No,’ Stella said, and told the story.

At the end Louise said, ‘So you’re sleeping with him?’ and Stella actually blushed, and said yes, only for a few weeks, she’d wanted to be certain.

‘And how is it?’ Louise asked.

Stella just glanced up at her quickly, with a tight grin, and shook her head. Louise reached out and mussed her hair. ‘You banana,’ she said. ‘Are you in love with him?’ And Stella’s eyebrows disappeared off the top of her head. The grin again, the headshake.

‘Oh God, you’re in love,’ Louise said. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t spot it. I’m a terrible friend.’

‘No, you’re a beautiful friend,’ Stella said, and her eyes filled with tears.

‘Please don’t not tell me things,’ Louise said.

Then, ‘Tart for affection, eh.’

Stella hugged her.