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away from Malcolm and Melissa and wished I’d never thought of asking Alice.
    Between then and the twentieth, Alice thought that we should go in boiler suits, in tennis gear, dressed as Greek peasants, and at one stage that we should dress up as nuns and tell her that this was what we were in real life. With difficulty I managed to persuade her that we were not to look on the evening as some kind of search-and-destroy mission, and Alice reluctantly agreed.
    I don’t really know why we had allowed the beautiful couple to become so much a part of our fantasy life. It wasn’t as if we had nothing else to think about. Alice was a solicitor with a busy practice consisting mainly of battered wives, worried one-parent families faced with eviction, and a large vocal section of the female population who felt that they had been discriminated against in their jobs. She had an unsatisfactory love life going on with one of the partners in the firm, usually when his wife was in hospital, which didn’t make her feel at all guilty, she saw it more as a kind of service that she was offering. I work in a theatre writing publicity handouts and arranging newspaper interviews for the stars, and in my own way I meet plenty of glittering people. I sort of love a hopeless man who is a good writer but a bad person to love, since he loves too many people, but it doesn’t break my heart.
    I don’t suppose that deep down Alice and I want to live in a big house in Holland Park, and be very beautiful and charming, and have a worthy job like Melissa raising money for a good cause, and be married to a very bright, sunny-looking man like Malcolm, who runs a left-wing bookshop that somehow has made him a great deal of money. I don’t
suppose
we could have been directly envious. More indirectly irritated, I would have thought.
    I was very irritated with myself on the night of the twentieth because I changed five times before Alice came to collect me. The black sweater and skirt looked too severe, the gingham dress, mutton dressed as lamb, the yellow too garish, the pink too virginal. I settled for a tapestry skirt and a cheap cotton top.
    “Christ, you look like a suite of furniture,” said Alice when she arrived.
    “Do I? Is it terrible?” I asked, anxious as a sixteen-year-old before a first dance.
    “No, of course it isn’t,” said Alice. “It’s fine, it’s just a bit sort of sofa coverish if you know what I mean. Let’s hope it clashes with her decor.”
    Tears of rage in my eyes, I rushed into the bedroom and put on the severe black again. Safe is what magazines call black. Safe I would be.
    Alice was very contrite.
    “I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t know why I said that, it looked fine. I’ve never given two minutes’ thought to clothes, you know that. Oh for God’s sake wear it, please. Take off the mourning gear and put on what you were wearing.”
    “Does this look like mourning then?” I asked, riddled with anxiety.
    “Give me a drink,” said Alice firmly. “In ten years of knowing each other we have never had to waste three minutes talking about clothes. Why are we doing it tonight?”
    I poured her a large Scotch and one for me, and put on a jokey necklace which took the severe look away from the black. Alice said it looked smashing.
    Alice told me about a client whose husband had put Vim in her tin of tooth powder and she had tried to convince herself that he still wasn’t too bad. I told Alice about an ageing actress who was opening next week in a play, and nobody, not even the man I half love, would do an interview with her for any paper because they said, quite rightly, that she was an old bore. We had another Scotch to reflect on all that.
    I told Alice about the man I half loved having asked me to go to Paris with him next weekend, and Alice said I should tell him to get stuffed, unless, of course, he was going to pay for the trip, in which case I must bring a whole lot of different judgements to bear. She said