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Houghton went over to the writing table and roused her characters in the hope they would provide some consolation.
    â€œJust imagine, Melinda,” she said in her brightest tone. “By tonight you and Johnny will be officially engaged! And after all you’ve been through—the first meeting in Czechoslovakia in ’68; the bad period when you, Melinda, went in with the revolutionaries and despised Johnny for keeping his safe job; the time when you wanted to emigrate, Johnny, and Melinda had met the feminists and wouldn’t go and live abroad for your sake. All over now, and you are going to settle down and live happily in the country—Dorset, I think.”
    â€œWill I have to go off the Pill?” Melinda asked sulkily.
    She had settled, as Cecilia Houghton had expected she would, on the bed beside the half-filled suitcase. The red silk dress she had been wearing last night, when she and Johnny had celebrated their engagement in a Chelsea restaurant, showed signs of fatigue but was as alluring as ever, her dark hair dishevelled now and falling on the whiteshoulders dotted with freckles so often described in the previous two volumes of the trilogy.
    â€œNot yet,” her creator snapped. “There will be problems in your marriage first. I thought you had the imagination to realise that, Melinda. As for you, Johnny, you will have to show a good deal more consideration to Melinda once you are married. Some of those bad habits—poring over your books until late in the night, the dope smoking you went in for in Volume Two—will simply have to go. Melinda may talk of independence, but hearken ye unto me, all women need attention, and plenty of it!”
    Johnny had materialised over by the window and was leaning against the sill in one of his typical defiant attitudes. He avoided Mrs Houghton’s bright, admonishing eye and reached in the pocket of his jeans jacket for cigarettes.
    â€œI’m going to get you a suit,” Mrs Houghton went on, a note of cruelty in her voice. “Once your uncle dies and leaves you the legacy, that is. You can scarcely own a small farm and go up to a show in London once a month dressed like that!”
    Johnny’s shoulders rose and fell in angry resignation. He glanced at Melinda, but without warmth; there seemed to be little understanding between the lovers this morning.
    â€œIt was a tiring night on the town.” Mrs Houghton finished her unpacking and smiled firmly at the young couple. At the same time she wondered if it was wise to leave them in this state, and go down to tea. Once, when she had been writing them in a first-floor suite at Bournemouth, they had disappeared while she was at lunch and she had had to go back to London to find them, two days searching Islington and the King’s Cross area before finally coming across them huddled in separate corners of a disreputable pub. She had written the scene in, but reluctantly; and time and money had been wasted. It would be the last straw if they escaped the Westringham, leaving her with long blank days and the company of the other residents.
    â€œWe haven’t had a meal for a long time,” Johnny said after a threatening silence. He looked more than ever today, Mrs Houghton reflected, like a mixture between Belmondo and Mick Jagger, and she wondered if she could modify his appearance slightly in the final volume. Too Sixties, she muttered under her breath as she laid out fresh paper and the little pot of white substance so essential for obliterating mistakes. But what does a Seventies man look like? Of course, age will change him. Mellow him, she corrected herself. And short hair can work wonders. Yes, a visit to the barber in the opening chapter, that’s the thing.
    â€œI thought this was meant to be realism,” Johnny said. “You did our engagement dinner a week ago, before the trouble at Aunty Joan’s. I’m starving.”
    â€œI want to get out of