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you.”
    â€œTo save you the hassle of getting across London to the restaurant on your own. He’s been well brought-up. Will he arrive with a propitiatory bunch of red roses?”
    Emma laughed. “No, he won’t arrive with flowers, and if he did they wouldn’t be red roses.”
    They had reached the war memorial at the end of Station Road. On his decorated plinth the statue of the young warrior strode with magnificent insouciance to his death. When Emma’s father had been Master of his college, her nurse would take her and her sister for walks in the nearby botanical garden. On the way home they would make a short diversion so that the children could obey the nurse’s injunction to wave to the soldier. The nurse, a widow of the Second World War, had long been dead, as were Emma’s mother and sister. Only her father, living his solitary life among his books in a mansion flat in Marylebone, remained of the family. But Emma never passed the memorial without the pang of guilt that she no longer waved. Irrationally it seemed a wilful disrespect for more than the war dead generations.
    On the station platform lovers were already indulging in their protracted goodbyes. Several couples strolled hand in hand. Another, the girl pressed hard against the waiting-room wall, looked as motionless as if they had been glued together.
    Emma said suddenly, “Doesn’t the very thought of it bore you, the sexual merry-go-round?”
    â€œMeaning?”
    â€œThe modern mating ritual. You know how it is. You’ve probably seen more of it in London than I have here. Girl meets boy. They fancy each other. They go to bed, sometimes after the first date. It either works out and they become a recognized couple or it doesn’t. Sometimes it ends the following morning when she sees the state of the bathroom, the difficulty of getting him out of bed to go to work and his obvious acceptance that she’ll be the one to squeeze the oranges and make the coffee. If it works out he eventually moves in with her. It’s usually that way round, isn’t it? Have you ever met a case where she moves in with him?”
    Clara said, “Maggie Foster moved in with her chap. You probably don’t know her. Read maths at King’s and got a two-one. But it’s generally believed that Greg’s flat was more convenient for his work and he couldn’t be bothered to rehang his eighteenth-century water-colours.”
    â€œAll right, I’ll give you Maggie Foster. So they move in together. That too either works out or it doesn’t, only the split, of course, is messier, more expensive and invariably bitter. It’s usually because one of them wants a commitment the other can’t give. Or it does work out. They decide on a recognized partnership or a marriage, usually because the woman gets broody. Mother starts planning the wedding, father calculates the cost, auntie buys a new hat. General relief all round. One more successful skirmish against moral and social chaos.”
    Clara laughed. “Well, it’s better than the mating ritual of our grandmothers’ generation. My grandmother kept a diary and it’s all there. She was the daughter of a highly successful solicitor living in Leamington Spa. There wasn’t any question of a job for her, of course. After school she lived at home doing the kind of things daughters did while their brothers were at university: arranging the flowers, handing round the cups at tea-parties, a little respectable charity work but not the kind that brought her into touch with the more sordid reality of poverty, answering the boring family letters her mother couldn’t be bothered with, helping with the garden fête. Meanwhile, all the mothers organized a social life to ensure their daughters met the right men. Tennis parties, small private dances, garden parties. At twenty-eight a girl started getting anxious; at thirty she was on the