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warm.
    â€˜His name’s Eric. Wake him up!’ yelled the woman.
    â€˜Wake up, Eric!’ said Lucy. ‘They want you to sing.’ She shook his shoulder.
    Eric fell forward and out of his chair. Yellow stuff came out of his mouth and nose and went on Lucy’s skirt.
    â€˜Oh, he’s gone! He’s gone!’ said the woman. The chorus joined in. Lucy tried to sit him up, but he was too heavy. Eric’s accordion fell off its chair and landed with a discord of despair. Lucy felt the yellow stuff on her legs. Mobile adults came to her aid. An ambulance was called.
    â€˜At least he made it to the party,’ one of the ambulancemen remarked.
    After that Lucy quit the boards. She also quit Sunday school. The doll’s house went undecorated that Christmas. Its inhabitants lay slumped in drunken attitudes against the walls, with only a paste bowl of fruit for sustenance.
    Lucy announced on Christmas morning that she had become a vegetarian, and that caused trouble. She became insular and sulky, and hung around the house like one of the abandoned doll’s house people. In the spring she decided to become a gardener. She grew pots of geraniums, sunflowers, marigolds and tiny cacti from seeds. The runner beans had a bumper crop and Lucy cooked them and served them with lashings of melted margarine. Her father speared them on his meaty fork andpronounced them Very good indeed’. Then she cooked other things – cheese straws, jam tarts, Victoria sponges, banana cakes – tins and tins of stuff that nobody would eat. She started to take cookery books out of the library and experimented with grownup food. When she was fifteen she got an A in her Home Economics O level, and considered going to catering college, but the thought of all that meat put her off, and anyway, she already knew how to cook. Instead she took A levels in English, History of Art, History and Home Economics. She went to university in Southampton to study English. She met Paul. Life was going to be one long tea party.

Chapter 13
    Paul’s family lived in Sussex. They had moved there from Penshurst, a little village just outside Southampton, when Paul was fourteen. They all thought it interesting that Paul had seemingly moved back to his roots when he chose his university. Paul said that the Southampton University course looked the most interesting. His father, James Cloud, taught Latin and had curly grey hair and a penchant for sandals, not open-toed Jesus Creepers, but woven ones, French ones. He bought a pair every year at La Rochelle. His mother, Maggie, had very neat hair and favoured wraparound skirts. They liked the theatre, and living near Chichester meant that they saw a few good shows each year without having to brave the crowds and noise of the West End and the homeless at Victoria. That’s what they told their friends.
    Start-Rite shoes had been Paul’s lot. A liking for sensible shoes seemed to be genetic, and even when he was at his most rebellious – going off to school with a pair of drainpipes hidden under the flappy John Lewis uniform trousers Maggie had so carefully picked out for him, and so carefully sewn the name tapes into – he still wore a pair of desert boots which he’d Scotchgarded himself. He had a green canvas rucksack adopted from a friend. ‘David Bowie’ had been black marker-penned on the flap and was now fading to grey. Paul went through a phase of trying to skive and muck around, but he couldn’t help accidentally learning things and ending up with straight As. He was embarrassingly good at Geography and Biology. Hetried and tried, but he could always remember how artesian wells were made, the difference between taiga and tundra, the names and positions of the Great Lakes, the main stops on the Trans-Siberian railway. The cross-section through a dogfish was a doddle, phloem and xylem flowed through his fingers. He could draw a perfect diagram of the heart