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Cindy!'
    'You'd forgotten I existed.'
    'Of course I hadn't.' I'd only forgotten that Cindy Prettyman's full name was Lucinda, and that she might have reverted to her maiden name. 'Can I get you a drink?'
    She held up her glass. 'It's tonic water. I'm not drinking these days.'
    'I just didn't expect you here,' I said. I looked through the net curtain at the tables.
    'Why not?'
    'Yes, why not?' I said and laughed briefly. 'When I think how many times Jim made me swear I was giving up the game for ever.' In the old days, when Jim Prettyman was working alongside me, he taught me to play snooker. He played an exhibition class game, and his wife Cindy was something of an expert too.
    Cindy was older than Jim by a year or two. Her father was a steel worker in Scunthorpe: a socialist of the old school. She'd got a scholarship to Reading University. She said she'd never had any ambition but for a career in the Civil Service since her schooldays. I don't know if it was true but it went down well at the Selection Board. She wanted Treasury but got Foreign Office, and eventually got Jim Prettyman who went there too. Then Jim came over to work in the Department and I saw a lot of him. We used to come here, me, Fiona, Jim and Cindy, after work on Fridays; We'd play snooker to decide who would buy dinner at Enzo's, a little Italian restaurant in Old Kent Road. Invariably it was me. It was a joke really; my way of repaying him for the lesson. And I was the eldest and making more money. Then the Prettymans moved out of town to Edgware. Jim got a rise and bought a full-size table of his own, and then we stopped coming to Big Henty's. And Jim invited us over to his place for Sunday lunch, and a game, sometimes. But it was never the same after that.
    'Do you still play?' she asked.
    'It's been years. And you?'
    'Not since Jim went.'
    'I'm sorry about what happened, Cindy.'
    'Jim and me. Yes, I wanted to talk to you about that. You saw him on Friday.'
    'Yes, how do you know?'
    'Charlene. I've been talking to her a lot lately.'
    'Charlene?'
    'Charlene Birkett. The tall girl we used to let our upstairs flat to… in Edgware. Now she's Jim's secretary.'
    'I saw her. I didn't recognize her. I thought she was American.' So that's why she'd smiled at me: I thought it was my animal magnetism.
    'Yes,' said Cindy, 'she went to New York and couldn't get a job until Jim fixed up for her to work for him. There was never anything between them,' she added hurriedly. 'Charlene's a sweet girl. They say she's really blossomed since living there and wearing contact lenses.'
    'I remember her,' I said. I did remember her; a stooped, mousy girl with glasses and frizzy hair, quite unlike the shapely Amazon I'd seen in Jim's office. 'Yes, she's changed a lot.'
    'People do change when they live in America.'
    'But you didn't want to go?'
    ' America? My dad would have died.' You could hear the northern accent now. 'I didn't want to change.' Then she said, solemnly, 'Oh, doesn't that sound awful? I didn't mean that exactly.'
    'People go there and they get richer,' I said. That's what the real change is.'
    'Jim got the divorce in Mexico,' she said. 'Someone told me that it's not really legal. A friend of mine: she works in the American embassy. She said Mexican marriages and divorces aren't legal here. Is that true, Bernard?'
    'I don't imagine that the Mexican ambassador is living in sin, if that's what you mean.'
    'But how do I stand, Bernard? He married this other woman. I mean, how do I stand now?'
    'Didn't you talk to him about it?' My eyes had become accustomed to the darkness now and I could see her better. She hadn't changed much, she was the same tiny bundle of brains and nervous energy. She was short with a full figure but had never been plump. She was attractive in an austere way with dark hair that she kept short so it would be no trouble to her. But her nose was reddened as if she had a cold and her eyes were watery.
    'He asked me to go with him.' She was proud