'I don't really know. I think not at the moment. He has, you know, had girls.'
'Oh, and Rosemary's had boys. Well, I say _had__, I just assume.'
'That's all I can do with William, assume. He's perfectly normal and perfectly fit and he goes about with girls. He's also thirty. And there we are.'
'Yes, and he's sure of himself in a good way. I think that's enough really. To be going on with, I mean. From your point of view.'
'I suppose so.' He went on without thinking much, 'I'm pretty sure my old man had a much better idea of what I used to get up to than I have about my son.'
'I wonder. If he had I doubt if he was any better off in consequence, your dad. But you can't help comparing, I catch myself doing it all the time. And things are much better now. Infinitely better than they used to be.'
'You and Rosemary, you're pretty close, I expect, aren't you?' asked Peter. Now he sounded sickly as well as fatuous. To improve matters he added, 'People say it's easier for mothers and daughters.'
'No great confidences, just a few little remarks she's dropped from time to time.'
'That make you think that... things have got better.'
'M'm. Yeah.'
That seemed to be that for the moment. Peter was not at all sure where this was leading but he could tell it was somewhere, if only from the look of slight tautness about the corners of Rhiannon's mouth that he had seen before. Then he noticed that she was goggling for his benefit at the nearest of their fellow-customers, who he was sure were too far off to hear them and not interested anyway. Oh Christ - Wales for ever, he thought: thirty years in London and further parts and when it came to _certain subjects__ you still kept mum when strangers were present, or visible, so as to be on the safe side now, see. He smiled; after a moment of mild astonishment she did the same.
At this very juncture the Mario-figure came bustling up and brilliantly announced to the party in question, 'Your table is ready whenever you like,' making about thirty syllables of it. Just as obligingly they started to move at once.
Rhiannon had evidently used those few moments to decide it was all right for her to go ahead. Not before the diners had well and truly departed, she began, 'What I meant about comparing, mostly anyway, what they don't seem to have now is all that awful routine you had to go through every time. I don't say they actually do any more of, you know, _it__, or less of it, or it's any better or worse when they get there but at least they're spared that. Sometimes when I look back, for a moment I can't credit it. It was like following an instruction manual- well, that's what it _was__, for goodness' sake. Stage one, arm round; stage two, kissing; stage three, more kissing; stage four, hand up top, outside; stage five, same thing, inside; stage six, really rude, not there yet but on the horizon. At one stage per date, max. It's like what some tribe in Africa used to get up to to make it rain before they learnt better. Only this used to goon for months often. And usually never get there. Same for everyone and no exceptions. Or am I exaggerating, do you think?'
'No,' said Peter, who in the last half-minute had found out he had not forgotten everything after all. 'Not in the least. And there were terrible sorts of tips on how to get round the rules.'
'Oh, and we had ours on how not to let them get round the rules. Phew. Could it have been a class thing?'
'I don't know.'
'No, unless it was just the aristocracy did different, because there were plenty of girls from the valleys in Brook Hall - you remember, and they were just the same. A bit nastier about it they were, I used to think, some of them. More cynical. I am exaggerating because it wasn't as clear-cut as that, couldn't have been. But there wasn't much that didn't more or less fit in with it in the end. I remember thinking once or twice at first it might all be Welsh, because of the chapel and everything, but I soon found out it was English as well. In a big way. So then I thought, well if I thought about it at all I thought it must be British. Couldn't be French. Didn't know about the Irish. The last thing was, do you remember those books by an American chap called Oh-something? Charlie was very keen on him. And the Sahara came into it somehow.'
'O'Hara. And the book you mean is _Appointment in Samarra__. I used to have them all at one time. John O'Hara. Good God.'
'That's the chap, but I'm not sure it was that book.
Anyway, I started reading whichever it was and I nearly jumped out of my skin, it was exactly the same. That side of life, I mean. And they were meant to be ordinary average people, not millionaires or actresses but not hillbillies either. There was this guy and the dame he fancied, and first time out nothing, he may have kissed her goodnight, I can't remember. Then second time out you were expecting it to be here we go, but it wasn't at all, it was so far and no further the whole way. It was a good deal quicker than it would have been here, but then it's a book, isn't it? But it was the _same__... _thing__. In _America__.'
Peter still had little idea of what was expected of him, if anything. 'Could you call it the old Victorian ideas on their way out?' he suggested, trying not to feel like an exam-paper and failing soon enough. 'How did we ever agree to go along with it?'
She nodded absently and squared up her cigarette-packet and matchbox alongside one of the ornamental grooves that ran the breadth of the table-top. 'Not making yourself cheap, that's what it was all in aid of. Anyway that's what it was called.'
'A charade, in fact.'
'In a way, yes, but it was not-a-charade as well. That was the whole trouble. One moment you said it very, well, cynically and then a second later you'd find you'd said it completely seriously. _Cheap__. I expect the chaps called it something too, didn't they, that whole system?'
'Probably. I think they mostly took it as just part of existence, something you had to put up with, like getting up in the dark to get the bus to go to university. And it was a comfort to know that everybody else was in the same boat. Or you thought they were, which was just as good.'
'Oh, we had that too. Tell me something now, Peter: say a chap's girl had said all right straight away,
