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by-product, learnt to enjoy sex immensely. She just couldn’t believe anything could be so wonderful, so all-consuming, so triumphantly intense—and so conducive to self-esteem.

    “So, darling, how is the job? Still enjoying it?”
    “Oh, Gommie. I just adore it. And I’ve got the most marvellous news: I’ve been promoted. Woolfe’s are going to do a new young department, called Younger Generation. And they think it deserves a young PR, to talk to the younger journalists. And, oh, Gommie, you’re looking at her!”
    “My darling girl, that is just thrilling. You are clever. Well done. How exciting.”
    “Isn’t it? I just can’t believe it. Lindy—that’s my boss—is so generous too. She says it was something I said that gave her the idea, and she’s told Mr. Woolfe that. And she’s so young-thinking, even though she’s quite old, I mean at least thirty-five, I’d say—”
    “Thirty-five! My God, Eliza, and she can still get herself about?”
    “Oh, yes,” said Eliza, missing this irony entirely, “and she’s really with it too.”
    “With it? What does that mean, darling?”
    “Oh, gosh, well, sort of … sort of young and trendy. You can apply it to anything, cars, clothes, music …”
    “I shall remember that,” said Anna, smiling at her, raising her glass. “It’s one of the reasons I like seeing you, darling, keep myself up-to-date. Well, congratulations. Now what about your love life; anything interesting happening there?”
    “Absolutely nothing,” said Eliza firmly. “I’m a career girl, Gommie, and a very ambitious one. Love, getting married, doesn’t fit into my plans at all at the moment.”
    “Better not let your mother hear you saying that,” said Anna Marchant.

    “What you doing this weekend then, Matt?”
    “Oh, not sure.”
    Matt grinned at Paul Dickens, one of his fellow negotiators—well, OK, fellow trainee negotiators—at Barlow and Stein, commercial estate agents.
    “Group of us going down the coast Sunday. Should be good. Going to be hot, they say. Want to come?”
    “Well …” Matt did want to go—a lot. But he’d promised Mr. Barlow he’d work on Saturday, and if he didn’t finish he was quite prepared to work Sunday as well. He wanted to get promoted, and fast.
    It wasn’t exactly a difficult job; there was a stack of letters to go out to a great many small businesses in the area, asking them if they were looking to expand their offices and letting them know that Barlow and Stein had every type of premises to show them if they were; it would save a lot of money if they could be delivered personally.
    Barlow and Stein was a small agency, based just off Great Portland Street and specialising in commercial property. Their clients were the fast-expanding businesses cashing in on the boom in every area of commercial life. London was the place to trade, and its commercial heart, the city itself, was the centre of world finance.
    Matt knew that he was on the brink of doing well. He knew, too, that he had the army to thank for much of his progress. He’d chosen to go into the Royal Engineers, and learnt stuff that he could see he could find very useful in his future life as a property tycoon. They’d done things like constructing Bailey bridges and studying mechanics and road building, and he’d played every sport available, fraternised with the locals—he tried not to think what his father would have to say if he knew he was snogging (and worse) with Germans—and some of the ATS girls were very … well, friendly.
    He’d left the army as Corporal Shaw, RE, and he went to the Labour Exchange on the very day of his demob, got a temporary job as an office boy, and spotted an advertisement for the job with Barlow and Stein a few weeks later.
    “We want someone with energy,” Mr. Stein had said at the interview. “Energy and common sense. And nice manners, of course.”
    Matt said he had plenty of energy and a fair bit of common sense, and that he