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tied one end to the second wiper and pulled the rest around and through her window. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘start up the engine.’
    Colin Kip did as he was told. Gillian manipulated the wipers manually; left, right, left, right. All superior and rhythmical and practical and dour-faced.
    Mr Kip was very impressed. He couldn’t help himself. After several minutes of driving in silence he took his hand off the gearstick and slid it on to Gillian’s lap.
    ‘Watch it,’ Gillian said harshly. ‘Don’t you dare provoke me, Colin. I haven’t put my Swiss Army Knife away yet.’
    She felt the pressure of his hand leave her thigh. She was knickerless. She was victorious. She was a truly modern female.

The Three Button Trick
    Jack had won Carrie’s heart with that old three button trick.
    At the genesis of every winter, Jack would bring out his sturdy but ancient grey duffel coat and massage the toggles gently with the tips of his fingers. He’d pick off any fluff or threads from its rough fabric, brush it down vigorously with the flat of his hand and then gradually ease his way into it. One arm, two arms, shift it on to his shoulders, balance it right – the tips of the sleeves both perfectly level with each wrist – then straighten the collar.
    Finally, the toggles. The most important part. He’d do them one-handed, pretending, even to himself, some kind of casualness, a studied – if fallacious – preoccupation, his eyes unfocused, imagining, for example, how it felt when he was a small boy learning to tell the time. His father had shown him: ten past, quarter past, see the little hand? See the big hand? But he hadn’t learned. It simply didn’t click.
    So Jack’s mother took over instead. She had her own special approach. The way she saw it, any child would learn anything if they thought there was something in it for them: a kiss or a toy or a cookie.
    Jack’s mother baked Jack a Clock Cake. Each five-minute interval on the cake’s perimeter was marked with a tangy, candied, lemon segment. The first slice was taken from the midday or midnight point at the very top of the cake and extended to the first lemon segment on the right, which, Jack learned, signified five minutes past the hour. ‘If the little hand is on the twelve,’ his mother told him, ‘then your slice takes the big hand to five minutes past twelve.’
    Jack wrinkled up his nose. ‘How about if I have a ten past twelve slice?’ he suggested.
    He got what he’d asked for.
    Jack was born in Wisconsin but moved to London in his early twenties and got a job as a theatrical producer. He’d already worked extensively off-off Broadway. He met Carrie waiting for a bus on a Sunday afternoon outside the National Portrait Gallery. It was the winter of 1972. He was wearing his duffel coat.
    Carrie was a blonde who wore her hair in big curls, had milk-pudding skin and breasts like a roomy verandah on the front of her body’s smart Georgian townhouse frame. Close up she smelled like a bowl of Multi-flavoured Cheerios.
    Before Jack had even smelled her, though, he smiled at her. She smiled in return, glanced away – as girls are wont to do – and then glanced back again. Just as he’d hoped, her eyes finally settled on the toggles on his coat. She pointed. She grinned. ‘Your buttons . . .’
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘The buttons on your coat. You’ve done them up all wrong.’
    He looked down and pretended surprise. ‘I have?’
    Jack held his hands aloft, limply, gave her a watery smile but made no attempt to righten them. Carrie, in turn, put her hand to her curls. She imagined that Jack must be enormously clever to be so vague. Maybe a scientist or a schoolteacher at a boys’ private school or maybe a philosophy graduate. Not for a moment did it dawn on her that he might be a fool. And that was sensible, because he was no fool.
    Carrie met Sydney two decades later, while attending self-defence classes. Sydney had long, auburn ringlets and freckles and