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night?”
    “Oh, Janey, you and your premonitions. Ivor wants to make it the eighteenth and I can't exactly tell him it won't suit
you.
Besides, I've already told Gerry that you and I are going to the theater.”
    Without even asking me. I ought to be used to it, it's the way most people treat me. Starting with Mummy, they all know that if I am not with them I'm not likely to be going anywhere. It's a funny thing really. You read in the papers about young people going to raves and clubs, out every night, being promiscuous, drinking too much and taking drugs. Well, I'm young, but I don't even know what a rave is. I could count on the fingers of one hand how many menhave asked me out, and as for the number who have wanted to see me again—well, I won't go on. There's no point.
    In actual fact, I have seldom had to give Hebe an alibi. I hardly ever saw Gerry, so I wasn't around for him to ask me if we'd had a good time at the Odeon or a nice dinner at the Café Rouge. He never actually checked. I mean he never rang up and asked if Hebe had really been with me. Probably he suspected nothing. Not then. It took a good deal to make him even mildly suspicious, for he had a trusting nature. Did my conscience trouble me? I used to have one, but maybe I don't anymore. Spending so much of the time alone deadens things, and one of the things it kills is conscience. It makes you simply not care anymore.
    I'd never done this sort of thing before, and in fact I did very little of it for Hebe. Of course I promised various things, like not to answer the phone if it rang when she and I were supposed to be out somewhere but to put it on message, and to be aware of when and where Gerry thought we had gone so that if we did meet I could confirm our date. But that only happened twice, him asking what the film he thought we'd been to had been like and another time how Mummy was—she'd been in the hospital—when I took Hebe to see her. I didn't even have to lie about that. I only had to say that my mother was getting on well.
    So it wasn't too much of a strain and it only happened once every two or three weeks. I made myself take an interest in Hebe's love affair and I looked up Ivor Tesham in a directory called
Dod's.
I was working then in the Library of British History in Gower Street and it's full of directories and dictionaries, so there were plenty of places where I could find his name, but
Dod's
was the most comprehensive. He sounded rich and the photograph that accompanied the short biography made him look very handsome, unless thecamera lied, which it sometimes does. He had one of those sardonic faces that women find attractive, very dark eyes, and black hair. Looking at his picture, I wondered if he would ever get to be prime minister one day and that face would be famous. Hebe said he was very ambitious, though as far as I could tell she knew nothing about politics and cared less.
    But I was talking about May 18. The play Hebe had told Gerry she and I would be seeing was called
Life Threatening.
I never got to see it. I don't even know what it's about, and I can't remember who wrote it, except that it was some new, very young playwright and was supposed to be very sexy and crude. But the name I can never forget, and every time I hear or read that phrase—
life-threatening
comes in newspapers quite often—it resonates with me, so that I see Hebe's face and hear her voice again and think of the way she died.
    She had picked that play because it's very long—it ran for about three hours—so Gerry wouldn't wonder what was going on if she didn't come in till after midnight. I asked her what the scenario was for that evening with her and Ivor that she was going to be with him so much longer than usual and she said he was fixing up a birthday treat for her, her birthday present.
    “I thought the pearls were your birthday present,” I said.
    She'd told me about them, said he'd already given them to her and what a clever present this was