For Maura McCarthy

with love

The idea for PRUDENCE first came to me in 1967. I wrote it as a long short story called HOUSE OF CARDS and it appeared in serial form in 19. I took the story and completely rewrote it, and the result is PRUDENCE.

For the twentieth time I said goodnight to Pendle and let myself into the flat. Big Ben was striking eleven. Jane, my flatmate, stretched out in front of the fire, raised a scarlet face to me through a mass of drying blonde hair.

‘Any progress?’ she asked hopefully, then answered for herself. ‘No, obviously not — you look as unpounced upon as ever.’

I went over to the mirror. My curls were unruffled, my lipstick unsmudged. Boasting apart, I looked great. Why then, after twenty dates, hadn’t Pendle made a pass at me?

We’d met at a party a couple of months back — a ghastly What-do-you-do-for-a-living? Oh-I-bash-a-typewriter sort of party, with overhead lighting and someone dishing fruit salad from a huge bowl into our glasses. Pendle and I were the only sheep among a huge crowd of goats, but then they always say the fairest flowers grow on the foulest dung-heaps.

He was not the sort of man you noticed immediately — light brown hair, a thin, expressionless face and pale grey eyes, but he had a detachment and exaggerated cool that was, in itself, a provocation. He wore a charcoal grey suit, of the most irreproachable orthodoxy, grey shirt and a pale tie, but he was tall and very thin, so his clothes looked good on him.

I was wearing my joke kit that evening. I’m very sensitive to clothes. When I wear frills I become demure; in studded leather, I stride around and act butch, but when I wear my joke kit — orange Bermudas with braces and a cheesecloth shirt — I scintillate and tell jokes. When Pendle came over and joined our group, I rattled off three jokes in quick succession that had everyone except him falling about, so I moved off to talk to someone else.