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the women. Instead he turned and stared hard, it seemed with curiosity, at Ian. Then he limped to where Ian sat, and sat down by him. No one spoke.
    The women stared at these two young heroes, their sons, their lovers, these beautiful young men, their bodies glistening with sea water and sun oil, like wrestlers from an older time.
    ‘What are we going to do, Roz?’ whispered Lil.
    ‘I know what I am going to do,’ said Roz, and stood up. ‘Lunch,’ she called, exactly as she had been doing for years, and the boys obediently got up and followed the women into Roz’s house.
    ‘You’d better get that dressed,’ said Roz to her son. It was Ian who fetched the box of bandages and Elastoplast and put disinfectant on the bite, and then tied up the wound.
    On the table was the usual spread of sausages and cheese and ham and bread, a big dish of fruit, and the four sat around the table and ate. Not a word. And then Roz spoke calmly, deliberately. ‘We all have to behave normally. Remember - everything must be as usual, as it always is.’
    The boys looked at each other, for information, it seemed. They looked at Lil. They looked at Roz. They frowned. Lil was smiling, but only just. Roz cut an apple into four, pushed a quarter each at the others, and bit juicily into her segment.
    ‘ Very funny,’ said Ian.
    ‘I think so,’ said Roz.
    Ian got up, clutching a big sandwich stuffed with salad, the apple quarter in his other hand, and went into Roz’s room.
    ‘Well’ said Lil, laughing with something like bitterness.
    ‘Exactly,’ said Roz.
    Tom got up, and went out and across the street to Lil’s house.
    ‘What are we going to do?’ Lil asked her friend, as if she expected an answer, there and then.
    ‘It seems to me we are doing it,’ said Roz. She followed Ian into her bedroom.
    Lil collected up the box with the medicaments and bandages, and walked across to her house. On the way she waved to Saul Hutler, who was on his verandah.
    School began: it was the boys’ last year. Both were prefects, and admired. Lil was often in other towns and places, judging, giving prizes, making speeches, a well-known figure, this slim, tall, shy woman, in her pale perfect linens, her fair hair smooth and neat. She was known for her kind smile, her sympathy, her warmth. Girls and boys had crushes on her and wrote letters that often included, ‘I know that you would understand me.’ Roz was supervising productions of musicals at a couple of schools, and working on a play, a farce, about sex, a magnetic noisy woman who insisted that her bite was much worse than her bark: ‘So watch out: don’t make me angry!’

    The four were in and out, together or separately, nothing seemed to have changed, they ate their meals with windows open on the street, they swam, but sometimes were by themselves on the beach because the boys were out surfing, leaving them behind.
    Both had changed, Ian more than Tom. Diffident, shy and awkward he had been, but now he was confident, adult. Roz, who remembered the anguished boy when he had first come to her bed, was quietly proud, but she could never of course say a word to anyone, not even Lil. She had made a man of him, all right. Look at him … never these days did he clutch and chug and weep, because of his loneliness and his vanished father. He was quietly proprietorial with her, which amused her - and she adored it. Tom, who had never suffered from shyness or self-doubt, had become a strong, thoughtful youth, who was protective of Lil in a way that Roz had not seen. These were no longer boys, but young men, and good-looking, and so the girls were after them, and both Lil’s house and Roz’s were, they joked - like fortresses against delirious and desirous young women. But inside these houses, open to sun, sea breezes, the sounds of the sea, were rooms where no one went but Ian and Roz, Tom and Lil.
    Lil said to Roz she was so happy it made her afraid. ‘How could anything possibly be as