I said to him, getting in before he could, “My son’s had all these advantages, and all that education, and look at him, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. His son’s got a scholarship and Mr Gates wanted me to know it. Molly said: ‘Yesterday he came in for coffee.

When he reached under their window, the man looked up and nodded. The milkman had white shirt-sleeves, rolled up and his son, a boy of sixteen, was sliding the gleaming white bottles from a wire basket on to the doorsteps. The room they sat in was on the first floor, overlooking a narrow side street, whose windows had flower boxes and painted shutters, and whose pavements were decorated with three basking cats, a pekinese and the milk-cart, late because it was Sunday. This, then, was the situation to which Molly often referred as: ‘It’s all very odd, isn’t it?’ Richard and she, once the business of the divorce was over, became friends again. He had then married Marion, and there were three boys. Richard at twenty had already been on the way to becoming the very solid businessman he had since proved himself: and Molly and he had stood their incompatibility for not much more than a year. The boy Tommy was a product of this marriage. She knew now she had married out of a need for security and even respectability. She had married, at the age of eighteen, the son of a friend of her father’s. Her childhood had been disastrous, since this marriage only lasted a few months. Her mother and father had both glittered, but briefly, in the intellectual and bohemian circles that had spun around the great central lights of Huxley, Lawrence, Joyce, etc. Molly was the product of what she referred to as ‘one of those ’twenties marriages’. Richard was Molly’s husband or rather, he had been her husband.

Doris lessing the golden