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leaving her to her own devices. So Georgina's dream of having this new and glamorous companion sitting next to her at the dull, staid dinner that would have been arranged by her mother for a favoured few was to be shattered. As to the fib that had got him out of it, I blush to say I covered for him. In my defence, this was not really by choice but entirely in obedience to natural impulse. When any woman talks of a man's excuse to another man, he is somehow bound to support the fiction as part of a kind of race loyalty. 'Robert says you're having lunch with him next week' forces any male to respond with something along the lines of 'I'm looking forward to having a good catch-up,' even if it's the first he's heard of the plan. Often, afterwards, a man may chastise the friend or acquaintance who has brought this about. 'How dare you put me on a spot like that?' Even so, it is against male nature to speak the truth. The alternative would be to say, 'I have never heard of this lunch. Robert must have a mistress.' But no man can utter these words, even when he is entirely on the side of the woman being lied to. I smiled at Georgina. 'Well, it's just a dinner for a few of us. It's not at all crucial, if you really need him.'
    She shook her head. 'No, no. I don't want to mess things up. Daddy was annoyed when I asked him, anyway. That's why I didn't invite you,' she added lamely. 'He thinks we're too many as it is.' Too many duds, I thought, and not enough possibilities. But then, Damian would not qualify in this group. Mrs Waddilove was not in the market for an adventurer.
    'Who's coming?'
    'I wish you were,' she muttered obediently. 'But as I say, it's not a big party.' I nodded. Having paid lip service to form, she listed half a dozen names. 'Princess Dagmar. And the Tremayne brothers, I think, but there may be a problem.' I bet there will be, I thought. 'Andrew Summersby and his sister.' She ticked off these people in her head, although the list carried her mother's fingerprints, not her own. 'That's about it.'
    I glanced over to where the lumpen, red-faced Viscount Summersby stood glumly nursing his drink. He had apparently abandoned any efforts at conversation with his neighbours. Their state was no doubt the more blessed. Meanwhile, in front of him, his sister, Annabella, was shrieking and shouting as she tore round the track, a pale and lean companion trembling beside her. Her tight cocktail frock, raided from her mother's post-war wardrobe, seemed to be bursting at the seams as she wrenched the wheel this way and that. Annabella Warren was not a beauty any more than her brother but, of the two and if forced to choose, I preferred her. Neither was an enticing prospect for an evening's entertainment, but at least she had a bit of go. Georgina, following my gaze, seemed silently to agree. 'Well, good luck with it,' I said.
    The dodgem cars had stopped and the drivers and passengers were being forced from their vehicles by the waiting crowd of guests surrounding the track, anxious for their turn. They had a distinctive look, those girls of long ago, racing across the metal, bolted floor to squeeze into the dirty and dented cars awaiting them, part 1950s Dior, part 1960s Carnaby Street, acknowledging the modern world but not yet quite capitulating to it. In the forty years that followed, that decade has been hijacked by the voice of the Liberal Tyranny. Theirs is the Woodstock version of the period - 'if you can remember the Sixties, you weren't really there,' run the smug and self-regarding phrases - and they have no conscience in holding up the values of the pop revolution as the whole truth, but they are either deceiving or deceived. What was genuinely unusual about the era for those of us who were around at the time was not a bunch of guitar players smoking dope and wearing embarrassing hats with feathers, and leather singlets lined with sheepskin. What marked it apart from the other periods I have lived through was that, like