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Leicester that night. I had a lot of studying to do. At the door she thanked me, as if it had been me had worked the miracle. She embraced me and kissed me. In the background Grandfather was complaining to the TV about the influx of Kenyan Asians.
    I wash my hands of you all, I thought.

Lucky Stars
    What was it I liked so much about Shirley? Why did we become so rapidly and permanently attached? I can’t rightly remember. At seventeen, eighteen, one is so much immersed in life. One likes without noticing quite what or why, in a whirl of vanity and self-gratification.
    We met at a retreat intended to promote church unity. There must be an irony there. The well-to-do Anglo Caths in Chiswick High Street were dallying with the Shepherd’s Bush Congregationalists and Park Royal Methodists, and the youth of the three churches were lured off to an Easter Week of Prayer in a boarding school outside High Wickham. Shirley and I were drawn together in the second round of the table-tennis tournament.
    Thin as a rake, poignantly flat-chested, sinewy, imperious, athletic, dynamic, she bounced and swayed threateningly at the other end of the table, four or five bracelets rattling on each wrist, be-ringed fingers lifted to cover her laughter, long copper hair falling away from a cocked cheek. One of the Anglo Caths, I thought, even before she spoke. I had to sweat blood to beat her.
    Perhaps it was the freedom and assurance she had which attracted me first, a strength of character and cheerfulness that meant you could never feel you were hurting her. And naturally I was impressed that someone from a higher class was interested in me. I liked the fact that her father was a lawyer, that the family was well-off, respectable, moneyed, and that my mother, with the way she always confuses respectability with morality, wholeheartedly approved of them. I was overwhelmed by all the contact of skin onskin, the way she shivered and melted when I kissed her ear, as I soon learnt to, the way she put a hand in my shirt as we walked across Gunnersbury Park. She liked to touch me. She wore a green silk scarf over her hair the way gipsies do, which somehow made me feel unspeakably tender, it gave her face such a bright, bird-like look, all eyes. But it was the sudden and complete intimacy that was most extraordinary. From the very first days together Shirley and I could talk about anything, everything. And amazingly we always agreed. She with me and I with her. It was uncanny. Had we not thrown religion and all its imponderables very promptly out of the window, we would have said we were made for each other.
    So that on arrival back in Leicester that evening, I immediately turned to Shirley for support. Hadn’t I been right? Hadn’t I? One sounded mean saying certain things, but the fact was they had to be said. We talked it over. Shirley agreed wholeheartedly; it was a case, she decided, where the older generation, my mother, and the sixties aberration that had followed it, my sister, were both erring in sentimentality and romanticism, were refusing to look long and hard at future reality, future practicality.
    Our room-mates Gregory and Jill were there, another solid sensible couple, and I was surprised, as we talked, how rapidly, on the basis of just a smattering of information, they came to the same conclusions I had. It was reassuring. Gregory said he found it extraordinary that people were even allowed to go on making the same old mistakes you read about in every novel, newspaper and social study, as if the centuries past had never been and the race had learnt absolutely nothing.
    We cooked ourselves omelettes with green peppers and ate, unusually, in front of the TV, since BBC 2 was kindly interrupting the snooker to show somebody’s version of Carmen (both Jill and Shirley came from the right class to be opera buffs). We drank some decent wine Gregory had tracked down that Sainsbury’s had started importing from Friuli, and toasted to