A courtship gets quickly under way. On Friday evenings Mundy will collect Kate from school, arriving early for the pleasure of watching her cope with swarms of multiethnic children. At the Hampstead Everyman cinema Kate pays for her own ticket. Over Dutch dinners at the Bacchus Greek taverna they laugh over Mundy's tales of Council intrigues and Kate's raging feuds inside the St. Pancras Labor Party. Mundy admires her for being a mathematician and says he can't add for toffee. Kate respects his interest in things German, though she has to confess that, purely practically speaking, she regards languages as a poor investment, given that the whole world will soon be speaking English. Mundy confides to Kate his dream of promotion to Overseas Drama and Arts. Kate thinks he's absolutely cut out for it. At weekends they walk on Hampstead Heath. When Kate's school puts on an exhibition of artwork, Mundy is first on the doorstep. Her solid socialist values--in her family home they were the only ones to have--mesh comfortably with whatever remains of Mundy's, and before long he too is giving up a couple of hours a week to lick envelopes for Labor.
