"Difficult to imagine," said his wife. "Tell all." She liked to hear stories of Barbara Ragg's inept.i.tude; she, too, had come round to resenting Barbara's enjoyment of the flat that surely had been meant for her Rupert, and ergo for her. She had tried to get Rupert to stop going on about the issue, but eventually decided that it would be simpler to join in his campaign. So now she found a curious satisfaction in his diatribes against Barbara and indeed came up with her own contributions to the feud. Well, it was all very well having the larger drawing room, she pointed out, but how could one possibly benefit from it when one's life was such a mess in other respects? Barbara's affair with the odious Oedipus Snark, for instance. It was as if the Recording Angel was punishing her for her occupying a flat that was not, by rights, hers.

Rupert was enjoying himself. "I went into her office to get something or other, and there was La Ragg sitting at her desk, white as a sheet. Drained. So I said, 'What ails thee, dear Ragg?' or something to that effect, and she looked up and said, 'I fear that I've made a small mistake.'"

"Small mistake!" expostulated Gloria. "La Ragg certainly believes in understatement."

"Indeed," went on Rupert. "She told me about sending the letter to the wrong author. So I said, 'How could you do that, Barbara?' And my question, I a.s.sure you, was an apposite one. I just didn't see how one could possibly write to one author in the belief that he's another."

Gloria shook her head in disbelief. This was such fun. "Absolutely," she said. "And her answer?"

"Answer came there none," said Rupert. "At least to begin with. For some time she said nothing at all, and then she opened her bovine mouth and said something about the two authors having very similar names. 'In what respect?' enquire I. 'Oh, they're both Welsh,' La Ragg responds. I ask you! Both Welsh! So Neil Kinnock is Welsh and ..." He waved his hand about airily, trying to think of another name. "And that other chap's Welsh, but would we confuse the two of them, just because they come from-"

"Wales," said Gloria. "There are loads of Welsh people. Loads of them. I don't see how one can confuse people on the grounds of their nationality. I just don't."

Rupert rolled his eyes upwards. "Well, she did. But wait here's the denouement. She then told me that this poor chap the one who thought that his book had been sold had gone out and spent the advance."

Gloria was very pleased to hear this; the story was getting better and better, just as Rupert had promised. She enjoyed her husband's stories of office affairs stories in which he came out rather well, as was to be expected, but Barbara Ragg and various other members of staff were shown to have fairly major failings again, as one might expect. "No!" she exclaimed.

Rupert nodded with satisfaction. "Apparently he went out and bought a new car. Cleaned out his bank account in the expectation that he would soon be getting the money for the book."

"Poor man," said Gloria. "But I suppose he'll be able to take it back."

Rupert beamed. "Not so fast. Apparently he had spent the entire day driving up and down Wales and clocked up an awful mileage. You can't take a new car back if you've put several hundred miles on it. It's not a new car any more. The value drops very quickly and dramatically the moment you drive out of the showroom, and even more so when you put a few miles on the thingometer."

"Odometer," said Gloria.

Rupert raised a finger. There was even more to come. "La Ragg then says to me, and I quote verbatim ipse dixit she says, 'I do hope that the agency will refund him the difference between what he paid and what the garage gives him when he takes the car back. In fact, I hope you don't mind I've written him a letter to that effect.'"

Gloria's eyes glinted. "Outrageous!" she said.

Rupert rea.s.sured her. "Oh, I nipped that in the bud all right," he said. "I told her that I did mind and that if she chose to rectify this mistake it was to be from her drawings on the firm and not from anywhere else. Those who make mistakes should pay for them, I said. And not with other people's money."

"That taught her, no doubt," said Gloria.

"She sulked," said Rupert. "She's a terrible sulker, is La Ragg. Went all moody. You know how women get from time to time."

Gloria looked at him sternly. "Some women," she corrected him. "Not all."

"Of course," said Rupert. "Of course, mon chou. That's what I meant."

Chapter 11: Caroline Meets Berthea.

Caroline put down the receiver. She had finished the telephone call she had been making to James, and had ended by blowing a kiss down the line. When, she asked herself, did I last do something like that? As a teenager, perhaps, when she had enjoyed those long conversations with her first boyfriend, Will Brown, and had found it so hard to hang up, although they really had so little to say to one another beyond half-whispered declarations of undying love. And then Will Brown had gone to university in Cardiff and broken his promise to phone her every day. So much for men, she thought; they promise things and then don't deliver. It was ever thus.

James was different. He always did what he said he was going to do, even if it made him just a tiny bit predictable. No matter. They had arranged to meet later that evening, when James would come round to the flat. They would cook a simple meal and watch a film together, making it the sort of evening that both she and James preferred. James had offered to cook if Caroline would go and buy Arborio rice he had a special risotto recipe that he wanted to try as well as a carton of creme fraiche and a punnet of raspberries. He would bring Parmesan cheese and asparagus for the risotto, and a bottle of wine that some friends had given him for looking after their cat while they went to Norwich for the weekend.

Caroline decided to go out to the shops immediately. None of her flatmates was in, and so she double-locked the door behind her and made her way out into the street. A short walk later, as she turned the corner onto Ebury Street, she found herself faced with a woman who had dropped her shopping bag and was bending down to recover a scattering of Brussels sprouts from the pavement. The woman looked up at her apologetically.

"I'm very sorry," she said. "I'm sure that you didn't expect to find your way blocked by Brussels sprouts, of all things."

Caroline laughed, and bent down to help her retrieve the last of the vegetables. The woman looked vaguely familiar; Caroline had obviously seen her in the area before, but had not met her. There were plenty of people like that; they were the neighbours in a loose sense but one had no idea who they were.

"London pavements are perhaps not as clean as they ought be," the woman remarked. "But boiling will get rid of most things, I'd have thought."

"Of course it will," said Caroline. She sounded very authoritative, she realised, although she had no reason to profess expertise in the matter. "My boyfriend wouldn't approve, though."

She had not called James her boyfriend before, but it came quite naturally. And it was true: James would be appalled by the idea of eating Brussels sprouts that had been on the pavement. She could just hear him: "They should be put down, Caroline, not eaten!"

The woman straightened up. She seemed interested in Caroline's remark. "Oh really? He'd disapprove? Why's that?"

Caroline felt vaguely disloyal in talking about James in this way, but she could hardly leave the matter up in the air now. "He worries a bit about germs," she said. "In fact he worries a lot about them."

The woman tucked the last of the Brussels sprouts back into her shopping bag. "I've seen you before, I think," she said. "We haven't met, of course, but we've seen one another, haven't we?"

Caroline nodded. "I live back there," she said, nodding in the direction of Corduroy Mansions.

The woman extended a hand. "I'm Berthea Snark. I think I'm just behind you. You know the little mews?"

"Of course. I sometimes walk past those houses and think how nice they are. I've often wondered what they're like inside."

Berthea Snark smiled. "They're very comfortable. Gemutlich, even." She paused. "But why don't you come in for a cup of tea? I was going to put the kettle on when I got back. You could satisfy your curiosity mine is a typical mews house."

Caroline hesitated. One did not accept invitations from complete strangers, and yet surely that rule did not apply to invitations from middle-aged women whose bags contained nothing more sinister than Brussels sprouts. No, this was not a "Have some Madeira, my dear" invitation; this was one neighbour inviting another in for a cup of tea after she had helped her pick up dropped Brussels sprouts. What could be more innocent than that?

Caroline accepted, and began to retrace her steps with Berthea Snark.

"Tell me about your boyfriend," Berthea said as they walked along. "Does he worry about germs all the time?"

Caroline laughed. "Of course not. In fact, I think I may have given you the wrong impression. He uses hand steriliser, you see, and is worried about handling coins, but I wouldn't say he's obsessed."

Berthea raised an eyebrow. "Some degree of concern about germs is quite natural," she said. "But, if you'll forgive my saying so, your young man seems to be rather too concerned." She hesitated for a moment before continuing. "You see, perhaps I should explain. I'm a psychotherapist. I'm professionally interested in these matters."

Caroline attempted to make light of the situation. "I a.s.sure you, James is quite normal." Is he? she asked herself. Is he really?

They were now at the entrance to the mews, and Berthea Snark was pointing to a red-painted door halfway along the row of houses. "My place," she said. "Let's talk further once we're inside. You can tell me all about your James." Then she added, "And his fears."

Caroline frowned. Perhaps she should not have accepted this invitation after all. Hansel and Gretel, she thought.

Chapter 12. The Wound in the Psyche.

" A cup of tea?" asked Berthea Snark. "Or would you prefer coffee?"

Caroline chose tea, explaining that she could not drink coffee in the afternoon or early evening. "It's the wrong taste," she said.

"I couldn't agree more," said Berthea. "Coffee is possible between seven-thirty in the morning and eleven-twenty. And then again after eight-thirty at night."

Caroline laughed. "That's very precise," she said.

"I'm not entirely serious," said Berthea. "And I'm quite happy to bend the rules I set for myself. But we do need some rules in our lives, you know. As a psychotherapist, I can a.s.sure you that we need rituals and rules to anchor ourselves." She paused. They were standing in the entrance hall to her mews house and she now directed Caroline along the small corridor, which led to a room at the back. "You know, we did ourselves a great deal of damage in the sixties and seventies. Which was before you were born, of course, but which will be affecting your world every bit as much as anybody else's."

Caroline looked about her. They were in a comfortable sitting room, neatly furnished in a surprisingly contemporary style, with one wall entirely taken up by shelves. A row of CDs stacked two deep, occupied one of the shelves, the rest being filled with books.

"What did we do?" she asked.

Berthea gestured to a chair. "Please sit down. What did we do? Well, I suppose I should have said something was done to us. We, in the sense of the ma.s.s of the people, the men and the women in the street, so to speak, didn't do it. It was done by people who considered themselves opinion-formers. Social change tends to come from the moulders and manipulators of opinion, does it not? So people who may be dismissed as theorists are actually immensely important. Mrs Thatcher made the great mistake of thinking that the academic talking heads did not count. They did."

Caroline raised an eyebrow. Was this woman mad? Was she one of those people who had some grand theory that they would thrust upon anybody they met, even somebody who had helped them retrieve their Brussels sprouts from the pavement? She waited for Berthea to continue.

"There was a body of opinion in this country that set out to remodel the fabric of our society," Berthea continued. "They weakened the common sense of the people; they intimidated them. They decried that which people ordinary people actually believed in. They spoke in the language of liberation, but what did they liberate people to? To a new servitude a servitude of shallowness and impermanence, of loneliness and alienation.

"They destroyed the familiar they preached against it, ridiculed it. And in doing this they weakened the notion of order in people's lives. People used to have a sense of what their lives meant because they belonged to things, and observed certain rules. You belonged to a union, or a church for that matter, which gave you a sense of who you were. It made you proud of your craft or your trade, or of being Catholic or Church of England or whatever. It gave structure. You also knew where you came from you had a body of which you were a member. You shared a culture."

Berthea continued to talk as she moved into the little kitchen off the sitting room. Caroline watched her as she filled the kettle and plugged it in. This woman was mad. She would drink her tea, then look pointedly at her watch and make her excuses.

"Half my professional time," said Berthea over her shoulder, "is spent trying to help people who simply don't have any purpose in their lives. They come to me because they are unhappy they think that therapy will help. But what are they trying to heal? The wound in their psyche or the wound in society? They're actually perfectly all right in themselves it's society that has done the damage because it's the one who's sick."

Berthea came back into the sitting room carrying a tray on which there stood a teapot and two mugs. She sat the tray down on a side table and poured for both of them.

"These observations," she said, "make me sound rather like some unreconstructed Marxist saying that society's to blame for everything. I'm not a Marxist, but I can't help noting the insights that many Marxists have offered in that respect. I think they're right, you know. They're right in their a.n.a.lysis of how the human self is largely defined by social and economic factors. Of course it is. And they're right when they insist that recalcitrant social problems crime, for instance have a social foundation. I would go further: I'd say that a very great deal of personal unhappiness stems from those roots."

Caroline sipped at her tea. It had an unfamiliar flavour.

"Malawian Lost Tea," said Berthea. "A little discovery of mine. Do you like it?"

Caroline nodded.

"I give tea to my patients," said Berthea. "I find that it calms them. But it's also a little ritual, isn't it? The pouring and the serving, the sharing. And tthat's what these poor people who come to me need so desperately: a sense of belonging. And what's better than inducing a sense of belonging than shared ritual?"

Caroline was about to say something, but Berthea was now in full flow. "Eating together," she went on. "That's one of the oldest, most basic rituals. If we eat together we join one another in an experience that declares and reinforces our shared humanity. If you eat with another you are, for the duration of the meal, joined with that person. The proud cannot be proud when they are eating with others because all are on an equal footing creatures in need of sustenance. And yet what are we doing to mealtimes? Destroying them. Do schools teach children to eat together? They do not. s.n.a.t.c.h a meal from a cafeteria, eat in isolation, huddled over a tray. Where's the bonding in that?'

To her surprise, Caroline found herself agreeing. Her att.i.tude towards her hostess was changing rapidly; the suspicion she had felt earlier was being replaced by a feeling that this was a woman who was really rather wise. And this made her ask herself whether she belonged? And if she belonged, what did she belong to? To Cheltenham? To the world of her parents? She had sought to distance herself from all that from the world of the haute bourgeoisie, with its preoccupation with possessions and cla.s.s but had she found anything to replace it? Berthea had mentioned rituals, and her parents certainly had plenty of those, with their Sunday lunches and golf club dinners (they certainly ate together) and bridge evenings, and all the rest. Were they happy as a result? In a moment of sudden understanding, Caroline realised that they were. Her parents were perfectly happy.

The realisation struck her as depressing ineffably depressing. For if they were happy, then it must mean they had something right. And if they had it right, then she had it wrong.

Chapter 13: I Do Not Want to be my Mother.

"Now how on earth did we get onto that subject?" asked Berthea Snark. "I thought we were going to talk about your boyfriend. "

"It was rather interesting," said Caroline. "What you said made me think about my parents."

Berthea put down her mug and signalled for Caroline to pa.s.s hers for topping up.

"I'm not surprised," she said. "Most people think about their parents rather often. Every day, in fact. We find ourselves doing something the way our parents did it, or using an expression they used. It's alarming, because we think that we're turning into our mother or our father. But we aren't really. We show some of their traits, perhaps, but we don't turn into them. Not unless we have a very pa.s.sive personality. Such people become their parents because they've nothing else to be."

"I do not want to be my mother," said Caroline.

"Of course you don't," said Berthea. "But the fact that you say it with such conviction indicates that perhaps you need to change the way you view your mother. You need to accept her."

Caroline said nothing. Berthea Snark did not know her mother; if she did, she would understand.

"Acceptance is so important," said Berthea. "Acceptance comes first, then liking. Accept yourself, and then you'll end up liking yourself. Not that I'm suggesting that you do not like yourself I'm sure you do."

Caroline felt emboldened. "Do you like everybody?"

The question seemed to take Berthea by surprise, but she soon recovered. "Me? Well, no, I don't think I do."

"Who don't you like, then? Your mother?"

Berthea shook her head. "Oh no, I admired my mother deeply. She was the most selfless of women. She did educational work in the East End years of it at a time when such things were encouraged. There were university missions they thought of themselves as missionaries. Nowadays we'd find that very condescending. No, my mother was a good person." She paused. "It's my son I don't like."

Caroline gave a start. Mothers did not say such things. Mothers loved their sons. They had to.

"But let's not talk about me," said Berthea quickly. "Your boyfriend what's his name?"

"James."

Berthea had fixed her with a gaze that Caroline found quite disconcerting. Perhaps it was time for her to look at her watch.

"James is such a solid name," said Berthea. "Is he a solid type?"

It was as much as Caroline could do not to laugh. "I wouldn't call him solid," she said. "More artistic. He's interested in fine art. We did a course together."

"Then it sounds as if you have common interests," said Berthea. "That's always a good sign. But you said that he's worried about germs."

"Yes."

Berthea looked thoughtful. "I don't know why I'm discussing this with you," she said. "As a psychotherapist, one is not meant to enter into attempts at diagnosing at one remove. Even if asked to do so which you haven't really done, have you? You haven't asked me."

Caroline hesitated. Did she want to know more about James, or should she leave matters where they were?

"I can see that you're undecided," said Berthea. "So let's leave it at that."