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was very small and they were still together, and later each time they met. Now they didn’t meet anymore. Whenever I wanted to see Manton, I made a trip to the city without telling Lindsay. I did it the day after my conversation with Crishi. I wanted to tell Manton about all the new developments and also about Michael and Lindsay wanting to donate Propinquity. After another, very short marriage of his had ended, Manton had given up his place in the city and gone to live in a hotel suite. This really suited his life-style much better, and he didn’t get married again but had different girlfriends.
    The principal one at that time was Barbara. She was my age but had more in common with my father than me. They both liked the same sort of good time and were always going out somewhere to have fun. That day they were going to a premiere where everyone had to come dressed in 1920s clothes; I guess that was the period of the film. When I arrived, Manton was out and Barbara was trying on her dress, which didn’t suit her at all and she knew it. She was a big blond girl, very healthy and wholesome and beautiful, and she spilled out of the skinny little sheath into which she had tried to squeeze herself. “What’ll I do?” she asked me. She meant about the costume, but Barbara was always asking me what to do, mostly about herself and her life; she didn’t have many people to talk to, and was always glad when I showed up. With me helping her, she struggled out of her costume, and she tied a loose robe around herself, which suited her much better—physically and psychologically, because whenever she got me on my own, she liked to be entirely relaxed and talk about every kind of intimate thing. She had taken off her bra too and was naked under her robe. She got on to the usual subject, how Manton wouldn’t marry her and how she was afraid of losing him because she was so dumb. “I knowI am, Harriet,” she said; her lovely big baby eyes filled with tears, and I said for the thousandth time, “You’re not .” And it was true: She wasn’t half as dumb as many people who think themselves very smart; and besides, she was really good for Manton, and I hoped he would stick with her. She truly loved him and looked up to him, the way I used to.
    When Manton came back, she got all nervous because of not being ready. But with me there, he took no notice of her; instead he went into his father-daughter act he liked to think we had. And I suppose we did have it—we were certainly fond of each other, but it was not in a parent-and-child way. Or if it was, it was the other way around and he was the child, though I can’t say I ever really saw myself as his parent—I guess his girlfriends like Barbara filled that role, even if they didn’t know it but thought they were looking up to him. That was what Manton needed from women, to be mothered and to be admired, the way he had got used to from his own mother and, even more, from Sonya, his stepmother.
    â€œHarriet, let me look at you!” He always said that and always went into the traditional Daddy-looking-over-daughter routine, holding me at arm’s length to beam at me with pride and pleasure. At the same time he was looking me over quite sharply. Of course he was desperate about the way I dressed—or rather, didn’t dress—and the most he could hope for was that my skin hadn’t broken out, or some other thing that might not do him credit. For a daughter was not exempt from the function of his other women of doing him credit: Manton would not have kept company with a frump. He sighed as usually on letting me go and said “Why don’t you let Barbara take you to some of her places, it’s the one thing she knows about.” When he turned his attention toward her, she at once began to babble the way she did when she was nervous—how she was just getting ready, wouldn’t be a second, that