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quite a lot. Being smokers, we both tended to nip off at lunchtimes for a fag at La Traviata, the Italian cafe down the road from St. George’s. We never sat together. There was something of a froideur between us, dating from an occasion a few years earlier when Sue had caught me sniggering over one of her class work sheets entitled “Dem Bones: The Cultural Roots of the Negro Spiritual.” Sue is a frightfully pretentious woman—always making the children do expressive dances to Pink Floyd and singing “American Pie” with them, playing her horrid little banjo. Underneath all that free and easy hippie malarkey she is actually the most awful prig—the sort of woman who wears Lady-Lite panty liners every day of the month, as if there is nothing her body secretes that she doesn’t think vile enough to be captured in cotton wool, wrapped in paper bags, and thrust far, far down at the bottom of the wastepaper bin. (I’ve been in the staff toilet after her and I know.)
    Also—and this was what made Sheba’s interest in her particularly incomprehensible—Sue is terrifyingly dull. A living anthology of mediocre sentiments. A woman whose idea of an excellent bon mot is to sidle up to someone on a hot summer day and bark, excitedly, “Hot enough for ya?” Many years ago, before the Negro spirituals incident, I had the misfortune of spending half an hour waiting with Sue at the 74 bus stop. At some point she actually turned to me and declared, in the halting, exultant manner of a person who was just then minting
a delicious epigram, “You wait—when the bus finally comes, there’ll be five of them right behind it.”
    On the Friday of that week, I was sitting at my usual lunchtime table at La Traviata when Sue arrived with Sheba. They were whooping and guffawing about something as they entered the restaurant. The imminence of the holiday had apparently put them in exuberant spirits. Or perhaps, I thought, a certain kind of self-conscious hilarity was the signature mood of their friendship. Even after they had sat down, they continued to break out periodically in giggles. Sue kept glancing around the restaurant, as if to make sure that their riotous fun was receiving sufficient attention. To avoid providing any gratification on that score, I took out a book and began to read. Although I hardly looked in their direction for the duration of my meal, I continued to be aware of their laughter. By the time I left the restaurant, there were five cigarette stubs in the little tin ashtray on my table, and my mood was dark.
    In order to fully convey the effect that this episode had upon my spirits, I should explain that, some years ago, I was dealt a very severe blow when my friend Jennifer Dodd announced that she wanted no further contact with me. She and I had been extremely close for more than a year, and there had been no warning of this volte-face. I was bewildered. She had recently taken up with a young man—a painter and decorator who had been doing some work on her sister’s house in Richmond—but she insisted that he was not the cause of her sudden change of heart. Beyond some mysterious references to my being “too intense,” she refused to furnish any explanation for her decision. When I attempted to plead my cause, she clammed up, and the more I cajoled and questioned, the colder and more unpleasant she became. In the last conversation we ever had, she actually
threatened to take out a legal injunction against me if I did not leave her alone. And then one Saturday, about six weeks later, I was sitting on the train, going to do some Christmas shopping in the West End, when Jennifer and her new beau boarded at Mornington Crescent.
    They sat on the other side of the car, just a few seats down from mine. As soon as she spotted me, Jennifer turned her head and looked in the other direction. But the young man—Jason was his name—proceeded to stare at me in an insolent and challenging fashion. He was a shiny-faced,