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looked for her keys. Then she let me kiss her. I kissed her gently, then I looked at her, then I kissed her gently again.
    ‘If you don’t wear make-up,’ she whispered, ‘it can’t rub off.’
    I hugged her. I put my arms around her and hugged her, but I didn’t kiss her again because I thought I might cry. Then I hugged her again and pushed her through the door because I thought that if it lasted any longer I would cry. I stood onthe doorstep alone, pressing my lids together, breathing in, breathing out.
    We traded families. My father died of a heart attack some years ago. My mother appeared to be coping well – in fact, she seemed almost exhilarated. Then she got cancer, everywhere.
    Gillian’s mother was French – is French, I mean to say. Her father was a schoolmaster who went to Lyon for a year as part of his training course and came back with Mme Wyatt in tow. Gillian was thirteen when her father ran off with one of his pupils who’d left school a year earlier. He was forty-two, she was seventeen. There were rumours they’d been having an affair while he was actually teaching her, when she would have been fifteen; there were rumours the girl was pregnant. There would have been a terrific scandal if there’d been anyone present to have a scandal around. But they just took off, vanished. It must have been awful for Mme Wyatt. Like having a husband die and leave you for another woman at the same time.
    ‘How did it affect you?’
    Gillian looked at me as if that was rather a stupid question.
    ‘It hurt. We survived.’
    ‘But thirteen’s … I don’t know, a bad time to be left.’
    ‘Two’s a bad time,’ she said. ‘Five’s a bad time. Ten’s a bad time. Fifteen’s a bad time.’
    ‘I just meant, from articles I’ve read …’
    ‘Forty wouldn’t be too bad,’ she said in a sort of bright, almost hard voice I hadn’t heard before. ‘If he hadn’t bunked off till I was forty I think it might have been better. Perhaps they ought to make that the rule.’
    I thought, I don’t ever want anything like that to happen to you ever again. We were silent, holding hands. Only one parent out of four between us. Two dead, one missing.
    ‘I wish life was like banking,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean it’s straightforward. Some of it’s incredibly complicated. But you can understand it in the end, if you try hard enough. Or there’s someone, somewhere, who understands it, even if only afterwards, after it’s too late. The trouble with life, it seems to me, is that it can turn out to be too late and you still haven’t understood it.’ I noticed she was looking at me carefully. ‘Sorry to be gloomy.’
    ‘You’re allowed to be gloomy. As long as you’re cheerful most of the time.’
    ‘OK.’
    We were cheerful that summer. Having Oliver with us helped, I’m sure it did. The Shakespeare School of English had switched off its neon light for a couple of months, and Oliver was at a loose end. He pretended he wasn’t but I could tell. We went around together. We drank in pubs, played fruit machines, went dancing, saw films, did silly things on the spur of the moment if we felt like it. Gillian and I were falling in love and you’d think we’d have wanted to be by ourselves all the time, gazing into one another’s eyes and holding hands and going to bed together. Well of course we did all that too, but we also went around with Oliver. It wasn’t how you might think – we didn’t want a witness, we didn’t want to show off that we were in love; he was just easy to be with.
    We went to the seaside. We went to a beach north of Frinton and ate ice-cream and rock and hired deck-chairs and Oliver got us to write our names in big letters in thesand and photograph one another standing next to them. Then we watched the names being washed out as the sea came in and felt sad. We all groaned a bit and snivelled like kids, and we were putting it on, but we were only putting it on because underneath we did