CHAPTER 1

      I

      Ann Prentice stood on the platform at Victoria, waving.

      The boat train drew out in a series of purposeful jerks, Sarah’s dark head disappeared, and Ann Prentice turned to walk slowly down the platform towards the exit.

      She experienced the strangely mixed sensations that seeing a loved one off may occasionally engender.

      Darling Sarah—how she would miss her … Of course it was only for three weeks … But the flat would seem so empty … Just herself and Edith—two dull middle-aged women …

      Sarah was so alive, so vital, so positive about everything … And yet still such a darling black-haired baby—

      How awful! What a way to think! How frightfully annoyed Sarah would be! The one thing that Sarah—and all the other girls of her age—seemed to insist upon was an attitude of casual indifference on the part of their parents. ‘No fuss, Mother,’ they said urgently.

      They accepted, of course, tribute in kind. Taking their clothes to the cleaners and fetching them and usually paying for them. Difficult telephone calls (‘If you just ring Carol up, it will be so much easier, Mother.’) Clearing up the incessant untidiness. (‘Darling, I did mean to take away my messes. But I have simply got to rush.’)

      ‘Now when I was young,’ reflected Ann …

      Her thoughts went back. Hers had been an old-fashioned home. Her mother had been a woman of over forty when she was born, her father older still, fifteen or sixteen years older than her mother. The house had been run in the way her father liked.

      Affection had not been taken for granted, it had been expressed on both sides.

      ‘There’s my dear little girl.’ ‘Father’s pet!’ ‘Is there anything I can get you, Mother darling?’

      Tidying up the house, odd errands, tradesmen’s books, invitations and social notes, all these Ann had attended to as a matter of course. Daughters existed to serve their