The Backward Shadow by Lynne Reid Banks

if I’m normal any more. Is it normal to choose the chaste life when one could be getting tied to bed-posts or rolling about on grubby mattresses in discothéques every night? I’ve been told so often lately that I’m a freak that I’m beginning to believe it.’
    â€˜Which is what you’re doing here.’
    â€˜The whisky is making you very acute, Janie. But then, you always were pretty perceptive, even before you opted for the life of a happy cabbage which I suddenly so envy you.’ She poured another drink and stared at the fire. ‘What a really wonderful smell that is—wood burning.’
    â€˜It’s apple and pine, mixed. I agree it’s wonderful.’
    â€˜And is that actual beeswax I smell on the furniture?’
    â€˜No,
Johnson’s Glocoat
. But it’s nice.’
    â€˜Christ, I’m going to cry.’
    â€˜No, please, don’t you start! It’s too much. I’ve been at it all morning.’
    â€˜It’s this
bloody
business of being alone,’ she mumbled, her face in her hands.
    â€˜I know. Do shut up, please, Dottie.’
    â€˜You’re lucky. You don’t know how lucky you are.’
    â€˜Yes, I do. But right now I’d give half my luck for half your ability to earn your own living.’
    She looked up at me through a ruined eye make-up.
    â€˜Is that what you were really crying about—money?’
    â€˜Sort of. Partly.’
    â€˜I’ll lend you some.’
    I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but that’d be no good. It’s not only the cash I want, it’s the feeling that I can cope.’
    â€˜You’ve coped up to now.’
    â€˜So have you.’
    She stared at me. ‘Ah. I see what you mean. No, past successes or gettings-by don’t really help at crossroads, do they?’ She dried her eyes and leaned her head back, staring at theceiling. We sat silently for a while and at last I said, ‘What about food?’
    â€˜Not hungry, really.’
    â€˜Bowl of soup?’
    â€˜Oh, well …’
    She fed David for me and seemed more cheerful. I was full of sympathy, and yet I couldn’t quite understand why she was so basically upset. She’d been in and out of jobs before, and would surely not find it hard to get another now, though perhaps not quite so close to her heart’s desire. I knew it was something deeper, a pot-hole in the long cold valley of being unmarried. It was some days before I pieced it all together from snatches of conversation here and there. It was all fairly hard to pin down or explain, but after my experiences in the L-shaped room, though hers were on a much more sophisticated level, I thought I understood.
    â€˜It’s the parties,’ she said, ‘and the dates, and the things you hear at them. It’s not just that most of the conversation is shallow and brittle and all the worn-out words for cocktail-talk; there’s a viciousness there, a feeling of inner bankruptcy. I sat next to a young writer at a dinner party the other night—the sort of man one thinks one would like to meet, until one meets him. He’s very ugly, with a beautiful, aristocratic wife who sat across the table smiling tenderly at him all the time he was telling me in a low, continuous mutter what a shallow, boring bitch she was. On my other side was a politician you often see on television, holding forth on brains-trusts—he’s supposed to be one of the white hopes of the future—and he was quite seriously propounding his theory that the best way to control the population in the East was to blanket the Orient in homosexual propaganda and try to turn as many young men as possible into queers.’
    â€˜He was joking.’
    â€˜Was he? Nobody was laughing. Then at another recent party that I got invited to more or less by accident, given by some tycoon in the rag-trade, one of the guests got a very little bit tight and made a speech