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bitterness.
    â€˜Exactly,’ said Roz.
    Tom got up, and went out and across the street to Lil’shouse.
    â€˜What are we going to do?’ Lil asked her friend, as if she expected an answer, there and then.
    â€˜It seems to me we are doing it,’ said Roz. She followed Ian into her bedroom.
    Lil collected up the box with the medicaments and bandages, and walked across to her house. On the way she waved to Saul Butler, who was on his verandah.
    School began: it was the boys’ last year. Both were prefects, and admired. Lil was often in other towns and places, judging, giving prizes, making speeches, a well-known figure, this slim, tall, shy woman, in her pale perfect linens, her fair hair smooth and neat. She was known for her kind smile, her sympathy, her warmth. Girls and boys had crushes on her and wrote letters that often included, ‘I know that you would understand me.’ Roz was supervising productions of musicals at a couple of schools, and working on a play, a farce, about sex, a magnetic noisy woman who insisted that her bite was much worse than her bark: ‘So watch out; don’t make me angry!’ The four were in and out, together or separately, nothing seemed to have changed, they ate their meals with windows open on the street, they swam, but sometimes were by themselves on the beach because the boys were out surfing, leaving them behind.
    Both had changed, Ian more than Tom. Diffident, shy and awkward he had been, but now he was confident, adult. Roz, who remembered the anguished boy when hehad first come to her bed, was quietly proud, but she could never of course say a word to anyone, not even Lil. She had made a man of him, all right. Look at him . . . never these days did he clutch and cling and weep, because of his loneliness and his vanished father. He was quietly proprietorial with her, which amused her – and she adored it. Tom, who had never suffered from shyness or self-doubt, had become a strong, thoughtful youth, who was protective of Lil in a way that Roz had not seen. These were no longer boys, but young men, and good-looking, and so the girls were after them, and both Lil’s house and Roz’s were, they joked – like fortresses against delirious and desirous young women. But inside these houses, open to sun, sea breezes, the sounds of the sea, were rooms where no one went but Ian and Roz, Tom and Lil.
    Lil said to Roz she was so happy it made her afraid. ‘How could anything possibly be as wonderful?’ she whispered, afraid to be overheard – by whom? No one was anywhere near. What she meant was, and Roz knew she did, that such an intense happiness must have its punishment. Roz grew loud and jokey and said that this was a love that dare not speak its name, and sang, ‘I love you, yes I do, I love you, it’s a sin to tell a lie . . .’
    â€˜Oh, Roz,’ said Lil, ‘sometimes I get so afraid.’
    â€˜Nonsense,’ said Roz. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll soon get bored with the old women and go after girls their own age.’
    Time passed.
    Ian went to college and learned business and moneyand computers, and worked in the sports firms, helping Lil: soon he would take his father’s place. Tom decided to go into theatre management. The best course in the whole country was in his father’s university, and it seemed obvious that there was where he should go. Harold wrote and rang to say that there was plenty of room in the house he now shared with his new wife, his new daughter. Harold and Roz had divorced, without acrimony. But Tom said he would stay here, this town was his home, he didn’t want to go north. There was a good enough course right here, and besides, his mother was an education in herself. Harold actually made the trip to argue with his son, planning to say that Tom’s not wanting to leave home was a sign of his becoming a real mummy’s boy, but when he actually