She said, ‘You went to a Chinese? The one by the river? He took you to his favourite Chinese?’ Like she didn’t quite believe me. ‘All of you?’

There was something in her voice that made me think she wasn’t happy about it. I tried to make her laugh by telling her about the Kung-Po Special, but she said she had to go before I’d finished. ‘What a big happy family,’ she said before she hung up. But not nicely.

I hope she’s all right. I hope I haven’t done something to upset her.

You can never upset Delilah. Not even if you try. She’s so thick-skinned it’s hilarious. We’re wearing orange-and-oatmeal face packs at the moment, so we can’t talk because of cracks. That’s why I’m writing in here. She is filling in her Snog Log. She’s got quite a lot of filling in to do. William, who was at Mass this morning, looking lanky in his smart trousers, told me he’d seen her at a club in Richmond last night, ‘high as a kite’. I mentioned this as soon as I got here, thinking she’d be sheepish. Fat chance. ‘I was just, like, wasted,’ she said. Apparently she got off with a boy. ‘I think it was a boy,’ she added. ‘It might have been two.’

She’s been on at me all morning. She can’t believe I don’t wear a proper bra. She says I’ve got good legs even if my hips are wide and that my elegant eyes show that I’m trustworthy and good at keeping secrets. She read all that from one of her magazines. There was more to say about the rest of me, but I crossed my arms and told her to get off my back – not to mention my earlobes and my cheekbones. I hate thinking about my body, let alone discussing it.

‘Best friend or lover?’ she started on after that. ‘Have you entered the Boy Danger Zone?’

‘The what?’ I said.

It was some quiz in the magazine. It claimed you couldn’t be friends with a boy without sexual tension. Delilah said I had to fancy William because everybody else does. I had to explain what it’s like in the real world – i.e. among normal people who don’t wear blazers and gingham dresses on a daily basis. In the real world no one fancies William. ‘You lot,’ I said, ‘are just desperate.’ That shut her up.

Oh, her mum’s called us down for lunch. Time to take off our face packs. I do hope I haven’t got a rash.

Marcus, who works in the City, flashed his napkin on to his lap and said, ‘So, Connie, it’s a hard year at school this one, isn’t it? All those hormones and a heavy workload. Though your mother tells me you’re doing brilliantly at Woodvale.’

‘Clever girl,’ added Tanya, smiling at me. I saw Marcus give her a look over the wooden and cloth sculpture in the middle of the table (a Madagascan fertility symbol, apparently). It meant: ‘And here we are spending all this money on school fees.’

Delilah knew what it meant too. She said, ‘So why can’t I go to Woodvale, then? I hate the high school. It’s all girls. It’s not the real world. I’m never going to meet any proper boys.’ By that I suppose she meant properly meet any boys as opposed to just snogging them in the dark.

Marcus cleared his throat. ‘I know, darling. I do understand. Maybe we’ll think about it after GCSEs.’ If I hadn’t been there I expect he’d have said something about the kind of proper boy she’d meet at Woodvale. If I ever bump into him or Tanya when I’m with William they look at him as if there might be something nasty on the bottom of his shoes.

Then we started talking about the imminent war. Marcus and Tanya are all for it. They said things like ‘enough is enough’ and ‘people have got to learn to see sense’. What did I think? I told them about the march planned at school.

Marcus tutted. ‘Kids,’ he said. ‘It’s just knee-jerk. There are complications in the situation that are beyond them.’

I wanted to say some of the things John Leakey had said – think globally, act locally – but I wasn’t sure it was the moment. I suspect Marcus takes his understanding of adolescence only so far. Anyway, Delilah got there first. She’ll use any excuse to go from mild parental resentment to full parental hatred.

‘You’re just a fascist,’ she said, jumping down from the table and storming out. ‘I hate you.’

See what I mean. Quite tense.

I went upstairs to see her when I’d finished my plate of food. She was lying on her new platform bed (very grown-up), under her pop posters (very grown-up), hugging Floppy Bunny (not very grown-up). We had a general moan about parents – Marcus and Tanya are going away in a few weeks’ time and she says they won’t let her have a party, but she’s going to have one anyway – and I ended up telling her about the Woodvale march. She looked positively thrilled. We can go to war, she said, but not in her name. She says she’s going to bunk off her netball match to join it. ‘That’ll show Dad,’ she said.

I said I was probably going to go too and we tentatively arranged to meet at the estate agent’s at the top of the high street. ‘But, Delilah,’ I said, ‘I doubt the environment will be conducive to meeting boys.’

‘There are times,’ she answered, ‘when one’s personal life has to go on the back burner.’

‘I’m glad you think that,’ I said. ‘People might be about to die, after all.’

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Got time for a pedicure before you go?’