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has to wear glasses with one blanked-out lens for at least eighteen months. Ruthie, honestly, can’t bear to see her daughter thus. Ruthie’s mother, of a prosaic nature, a lady who buys her clothes at C&A Outsize, doesn’t seem to mind.
    ‘If oil prices go up,’ says Maureen gloomily, ‘what’s going to happen to the price of synthetics? What’s going to happen to Mauromania, come to that?’
    ‘Go up-market,’ says Alison, ‘the rich are always with us.’
    Maureen says nothing. Maureen is bad tempered, these days. She is having some kind of painful trouble with her teeth, which she seems less well able to cope with than she can the trouble with staff (overpaid), raw materials (unavailable), delivery dates (impossible), distribution (unchancy), costs (soaring), profits (falling), re-investment (non-existent). And the snow has ruined the penthouse roof and it has to be replaced, at the cost of many thousands. Men friends come and go: they seem to get younger and less feeling. Sometimes Maureen feels they treat her as a joke. They ask her about the sixties as if it were a different age: of Mauromania as if it were something as dead as the dodo – but it’s still surely a label which counts for something, brings in foreign currency, ought really to bring her some recognition. The Beatles got the MBE; why not Maureen of Mauromania? Throwaway clothes for throwaway people?
    ‘Ruthie,’ says Maureen. ‘You’re getting careless. You’ve put the pocket on upside-down, and it’s going for copying. That’s going to hold up the whole batch. Oh, what the hell. Let it go through.’
    ‘Do you ever hear anything of Erica Bisham?’ Ruthie asks Alison, more to annoy Maureen than because she wants to know. ‘Is she still wandering round in the middle of the night?’
    ‘Hugo does a lot of work for Derek, these days,’ says Alison carefully. ‘But he never mentions Erica.’
    ‘Poor Derek. What a fate. A wife with alopecia! I expect she’s bald as a coot by now. As good a revenge as any, I dare say.’
    ‘It was nothing to do with alopecia,’ says Alison. ‘Derek just tore out chunks of her hair, nightly.’ Alison’s own marriage isn’t going so well. Hugo’s got the lead in one of Derek’s long runs in the West End. Show business consumes his thoughts and ambitions. The ingenue lead is in love with Hugo and says so, on TV quiz games and in the Sunday supplements. She’s underage. Alison feels old, bored and boring.
    ‘These days I’d believe anything,’ says Ruthie. ‘She must provoke him dreadfully.’
    ‘I don’t know what you’ve got against Derek, Alison,’ says Maureen. ‘Perhaps you just don’t like men. In which case you’re not much good in a fashion house. Ruthie, that’s another pocket upside-down.’
    ‘I feel sick,’ says Ruthie. Ruthie’s pregnant again. Ruthie’s husband was out of prison and with her for exactly two weeks; then he flew off to Istanbul to smuggle marijuana back into the country. He was caught. Now he languishes in a Turkish jail. ‘What’s to become of us?’
    ‘We must develop a sense of sisterhood,’ says Alison, ‘that’s all.’
    Alison’s doorbell rings at three in the morning. It is election night, and Alison is watching the results on television. Hugo (presumably) is watching them somewhere else, with the ingenue lead – now above the age of consent, which spoils the pleasure somewhat. It is Erica and Libby. Erica’s nose is broken. Libby, at ten, is now in charge. Both are in their nightclothes. Alison pays off the taxi driver, who won’t take a tip. ‘What a world,’ he says.
    ‘I couldn’t think where else to come,’ says Libby. ‘Where he wouldn’t follow her. I wrote down this address last time I was here. I thought it might come in useful, sometime.’
    It is the end of Alison’s marriage, and the end of Alison’s job. Hugo, whose future career largely depends on Derek’s goodwill, says, you have Erica in the house or you have