March 1997. The moon waxes and wanes, the sea responds with spring tides and neap tides, the waves fling up the pebbles with a grating roar and draw back again as they did when Matthew Arnold listened on Dover Beach.
A few days after Max and Lula Mae’s fifth get-together Lula Mae and Irma Lustig are lunching again at The Garibaldi. Irma flickers an eyelid and a red-shirted waiter appears with a bottle of Chianti. He opens it, pours a taster for Irma, she tastes it and fractionally inclines her head. The waiter pours two glasses and vanishes. ‘Zum wohl,’ says Irma.
‘Happy days,’ says Lula Mae.
‘What’s new?’ says Irma.
‘I’m pregnant,’ says Lula Mae.
‘I’ll drink to that,’ says Irma.
‘I thought you told me to be careful.’
‘And you carefully got pregnant. You’re not going to tell me it was an accident?’
‘Not really. All of a sudden I didn’t feel like taking the pill.’
‘Ovulation makes one hot to trot.’
‘Yup.’
‘Your interesting Max was the lucky man?’
‘Lucky or not, he’s the one.’
‘I seem to remember that he craved recognition from your kind of woman. Do you think he craved this much?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Are you keeping it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you told him?’
‘No.’
‘Are you going to tell him?’
‘I haven’t decided.’
‘Why not?’
‘He says he’s in love with Lola Bessington.’
‘Miss Too-Sure-of-Herself?’
‘Yes. I’d feel bad about coming between them but I doubt that she’s the right woman for him. He needs someone whose moral standards aren’t too exacting.’
‘And you are the right woman?’
‘I have doubts about that too. Sometimes I think being a single mother is more my style but at other times the idea of a proper family is tempting.’
‘Everest Technology gets more and more complicated,’ says Irma, ‘but there’s nothing as complicated as men and women.’
‘And we all come without manuals,’ says Lula Mae.
While Lula Mae and Irma tuck into their lasagne and drink their Chianti the not-yet-risen moon is waxing, comet Hale-Bopp trails its fiery tail unseen, night and day are approaching parity, and Lola Bessington, between customers at the Coliseum Shop, listens to Die Winterreise with tears running down her cheeks.