sat up and said to her

It was, as I say, a little game we all indulged in to some extent. Even so, it was Ruth who took it further than anyone else. She was the one always pretending to have finished anything anyone happened to be reading; and she was the only one with this notion that the way to demonstrate your superior reading was to go around telling people the plots of novels they were in the middle of. That's why, when she started on Daniel Deronda, even though I'd not been enjoying it much, I closed the book, sat up and said to her, completely out of the blue: "Ruth, I've been meaning to ask you. Why do you always hit Tommy on the arm like that when you're saying goodbye? You know what I mean." Of course she claimed not to, so I patiently explained what I was talking about. Ruth heard me out then shrugged. "I didn't realise I was doing it. I must have just picked it up." A few months before I might have let it go at that--or probably wouldn't have brought it up in the first place. But that afternoon I just pressed on, explaining to her how it was something from a television series. "It's not something worth copying," I told her. "It's not what people really do out there, in normal life, if that's what you were thinking." Ruth, I could see, was now angry but unsure how to fight back. She looked away and did another shrug. "So what?" she said. "It's no big deal. A lot of us do it." "What you mean is Chrissie and Rodney do it." As soon as I said this I realised I'd made a mistake; that until I'd mentioned these two, I'd had Ruth in a corner, but now she was out. It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to. Sure enough, I saw a gleam come into Ruth's eyes and when she spoke again it was in an entirely new voice. "So that's it, that's what's upsetting poor little Kathy. Ruth isn't paying enough attention to her. Ruth's got big new friends and baby sister isn't getting played with so often..." "Stop all that. Anyway that's not how it works in real families. You don't know anything about it." "Oh Kathy, the great expert on real families. So sorry. But that's what this is, isn't it? You've still got this idea. Us Hailsham lot, we have to stay together, a tight little bunch, must never make any new friends."