It was at a Christmas party in the 1980s. I was very young then, living with my first husband and our three children – the youngest still breastfeeding – in an oversized, dilapidated Victorian house with orange and purple wallpaper, and nylon carpets which gave the children electric shocks. We were supposed to be doing the house up, but that was a joke, partly because we didn’t have any money and partly because my husband was working all hours, trying to get his architectural practice off the ground. At the end of each day I was gratified if I’d managed to get meals on the table, the washing into the machine and out of it again, and all the children into bed. The doing-up anyhow was his idea; I hated DIY and was no good at it. In the evenings, when the children were asleep at last, I turned my back on the wallpaper’s swirling fronds, huddled for warmth under a blanket in one corner of our broken-springed sofa, and read books, which were my salvation. There was a theory in our marriage that I had a career too, as a journalist and reviewer, which I would at some point pick up again. But that was beginning to recede into myth, like the spires of a serene city on the horizon in a painting, ever more distant from the ship I’d sailed in.
This party was in another oversized dilapidated house, further down the same street, belonging to friends of ours, and I was counting on getting a lot out of it; I was wearing a new red stretch-jersey dress with a full skirt. I didn’t have any exaggerated idea of my attractiveness – I was like those birds the birdwatchers don’t count, a little brown job, and plumper after three children – but I thought that the red dress suited me. I’d had a couple of glasses of strong punch already, and was roaming the party in a state of anticipation that was almost predatory. I wanted life! I wanted to live more.
