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instead of trousers, wasn’t quite warm enough but she thought she looked more attractive that any other woman in the pub. Bored stiff during the meeting after her squabble with June, she had made shy attempts to catch men’s eyes but the only response had been from Jimmy. She couldn’t really think of Jimmy as in the same category as previous boyfriends and then she decided this was outrageous snobbery and caught his eye again, smilingthis time. But Jimmy, without smiling back, went off to pick up Dr Jefferson and Thea went home alone, where Damian met her in the hall to tell her they had run out of dishwasher tablets.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T hea filled the role of the gay men’s woman friend and yet she always felt that Damian and Roland didn’t like her much. She was useful to them and that was all. They liked men, gay and straight, and men’s company was sufficient for them. Considering how often she shopped for them, even cooked for them when they had guests for dinner, she thought they might have reduced her rent but she couldn’t bring herself to ask.
    She had a part-time job, teaching IT and basic word processing in an office skills school over the top of a drycleaner’s in the Fulham Road and she also taught an evening class called Internet Literacy. Considering the number of people over sixty who couldn’t use a computer and barely knew what ‘going online’ meant, for whom the class was designed, it was surprising how ill-attended it was. No doubt it would soon close down because of cuts and her income correspondingly cut. It made her cross that neither Damian nor Roland had ever asked her what she did for a living. Perhaps they thought she was like their mothers, had private means and did nothing. Perhaps they thought that when she went out it was to play bridge or have lunch with other ladies, also like their mothers. They were not interested in her and were only nice to her when they wanted to ask a favour orhad a reason to be particularly cheerful. Neither of them took any notice of Miss Grieves – if she had a given name no one knew it – the ninety-year-old who lived below them. It was Thea who shopped for her, fetched her a Sunday paper and helped her up the area steps when she was specially troubled by her rheumatoid arthritis. Damian called her the last maiden aunt left in London but if she had any nieces no one ever saw them. She looked old enough to be June’s mother and June really was a maiden aunt.
    The house belonged to Roland Albert who came from a wealthy family. To buy it in the early nineties he had sold an object called the Kamensky Medal to a Russian collector of Russian insignia. The medal, quite small and in Thea’s opinion very ugly, had been given to an ancestor of Roland’s by the then Tsar, had been handed down among his descendants and finally fetched the amazing sum of £104,000. This he had used as the deposit on a mortgage to buy number 8 Hexam Place. Even so, he could afford it only because the basement flat had a sitting tenant in the shape of Miss Grieves who had been there for a longer period than Roland’s lifetime. Over the years Roland and Damian had offered her, through their solicitor, various increasingly large sums to get out and so leave them with another floor to their home or else a lucrative property for rent. Miss Grieves, who had a racy manner, said in the words of Eliza Doolittle, ‘Not bloody likely.’
    In addition to being so kind and helpful, Thea tried to ingratiate herself with her neighbours. This she did with Damian and Roland in an attempt to make number 8 the most attractive house in the street by persuading Damian, the kinder and more easy-going of the pair, to buy window boxes for the second-floor windows, urns for the balcony that extended across the front of the first floor, and filling them with bulbs in spring and annuals in summer.
    Not that she did the planting herself. Now two weeks into October, she was awaiting the arrival of the