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the worst quarrel of her marriage, she said. She had naturally been blamed because it was clear from what had occurred that the boys had been alone in the house when they shouldn’t have been. Philip wanted to know how this had happened, his court-room manner sharpening his questioning and his argument. How long had his children been latchkey children, and for what reason were they so?
        ‘I wish I’d had girls,’ Francesca complained pettishly. ‘I often think that now.’
        Their Dover soles arrived. ‘Isn’t no help,’ the Sicilian waitress muttered crossly as she placed the plates in front of them. ‘Every day we say too many tables. Twice times, maybe hundred times. Every day they promise. Next day the same.’
        ‘Ridiculous.’ Margy smiled sympathetically at the plump Sicilian girl. ‘Poor Francesca,’ she sympathized with her friend, taking a piece of lettuce in her fingers.
        But Francesca, still lost in the detail of the rumpus there had been, hardly heard. An hour at the very least, Philip was arguing all over again; possibly two hours they must have been on their own. It was absurd to spend all morning looking after children in a nursery school and all afternoon neglecting your own. That Jason and Ben had been sent back early that day, that she had been informed of this beforehand and had forgotten, that she would naturally have been there had she remembered: all this was mere verbiage apparently, not worth listening to, much less considering. Mrs. Sleet left the house at one o’clock on the dot, and Francesca was almost always back by three, long before the boys returned. Jason and Ben were not latchkey children; she had made a mistake on a particular day; she had forgotten; she was sorry.
        If you’re asked to do anything,’ had been the final shaft, ‘it’s to see to the children, Francesca. You have all the help in the house you ask for. I don’t believe you want for much.’ The matter of Andy Konig’s video had been brought up, and Jason’s brazen insistence at the time that it was for Social Studies. Andy Konig’s video wouldn’t have been discovered if it hadn’t become stuck in the video-player, repeating an endless sequence of a woman undressing in a doctor’s surgery. ‘You didn’t even look to see what was on it,’ had been the accusation, repeated now, which of course was true. It was over, all this was followed by; they would forget it; he’d drive to the Mortlake tip with the golf-bag, there’d be no television for thirty days, no sweets, cake or biscuits. ‘I would ask you to honour that, Francesca.’ As the rumpus subsided, she had sniffed back the last of her tears, not replying.
        ‘Oh Lord!’ she cried in frustration at La Trota. ‘Oh Lord, the guilt!’
        Cheering her friend up, Margy insisted that they change the subject. She recounted an episode that morning in the antique shop, a woman she knew quite well, titled actually, slipping a Crown Derby piece into a shopping bag. She touched upon her love affair with the shop’s proprietor, which was not going well. One of these days they should look up Sebastian, she idly suggested. ‘It’s time I settled down,’ she murmured over their cappuccinos.
        ‘I’m not sure that Sebastian…’ Francesca began, her concentration still lingering on the domestic upset.
        ‘I often wonder about Sebastian,’ Margy said.
        
        Afterwards, in the antique shop, it was cool among the polished furniture, the sofa-tables and revolving libraries, the carved pew ends and sewing cabinets. The collection of early Victorian wall clocks — the speciality of the wearily married proprietor — ticked gracefully; occupying most of the window space, the figure of Christ on a donkey cast shadows that were distorted by the surfaces they reached. A couple in summer clothes, whom Margy had earlier noticed in La Trota, whispered among these offerings. A man with