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you with them. They are, inevitably, quite boring if you yourself are not in the thick of them.’
    I murmur something; nothing articulate, a sympathetic noise.
    The doors open and again a cloying, synthetic floral smell meets the damp air. Two women come out, laden with shopping bags.
    â€˜She has talked a bit about you.’ Dirk Neerhoff pauses. ‘She gives me a flavour of your conversation.’
    â€˜Well, it’s always lovely to chat with her. She’s great.’
    â€˜She is quite a mimic!’ Dirk Neerhoff gives a short, friendly laugh. ‘I do not have this gift. The expressions too. She does the expressions.’
    I glance at my reflection in the glass doors of the store. And then across the road, at the light beaming through the decorative etched windows of The Albert: the yellow brick pub, built in the 1860s, that is sandwiched between undistinguished office towers.
    â€˜Really?’ I say.
    â€˜I feel we have met. I hope this will be a reality in the near future. The four of us? For coffee?’ Dirk says.
    â€˜Good idea.’
    â€˜We will find a date. Unless a plan is made nothing happens. If we don’t speak again before Christmas, have a very happy—’
    I wonder whether the changed pattern of Jude coming to Dairyman’s Road rather than Ross going to the Bennet-Neerhoffs is connected with whatever is happening at home. Perhaps the atmosphere is terrible. Perhaps her parents row all the time. Or weep. My pleasure at the turn of events – Palmers Green one, Crews Hill nil – seems, in some far-fetched sense, to be at the other family’s expense.

19
    IT TAKES ME two hours to get back to Palmers Green station. At the moment Deborah Lupton imposes herself, I am in a trance, ascending to street level in the mass of commuters returning from work. The stairwell is poorly lit; the steps intermittently padded by damp, discarded newspapers. Her voice penetrates my coat at the level of my thoracic spine and travels up to my ears. Through thuds of disordered footsteps, it reaches me. I am in a state of holding steady, semi-stoical and semi-absent like an animal, a horse or an ox, pulling a cart up a hill, urged on by an unseen driver. Trapped between bodies and a brick wall, the paint of which has flaked into map-like patterns of green and sand-coloured continents, I hold and shall continue to hold, as I do every day, until the press of moving, breathing people eases, and I am out in damp air, walking along Alderman’s Hill, heading towards home and able to be human again. I keep my feet on the steps, all the while forced to feel the woman’s breath on my neck and to hear the powerful broadcast that reaches me in gusts. ‘… as you know, he failed to attend the performance review. Absolutely typical. What we have come to expect … didn’t even have the nous to give a pathetic excuse … guess is, he knows he’s floundering and didn’t want to face the …’ It is only through willpower and a reminder to myself of the social contract that I resist an overwhelming urge to give Deborah Lupton a backwards kick that will send her toppling down onto the upward-climbing strangers who will not know what has hit them.
    Once on the level, I continue to press forward. I turn right out of the station but she grabs my sleeve.
    I whirl round. ‘Just stop it. Calm down. Your voice is so bloody loud, everyone can hear you.’
    Her large, astonished face is close enough to be out of focus. The mouth twitches and opens. ‘Well, I don’t think anyone is—’
    â€˜They might be. You don’t know that. We are not a million miles from school.’ I blast words into the face and then take a step back.
    Deborah is staring at me as though I were a family comedy that had flashed up a scene of indecent assault. ‘Point taken, Lorna.’ She stands firm in her waterproof trousers. Her wellington boots are a foot