The Separate Heart and Other Stories

Robson's stories offer up the notion that separateness exists between adults, and between children and the adult world, no matter how well one may seem to know the other. They are also very, very English.

Here are tea parties in Oxbridge rooms, a vicar's concern for a cantankerous tramp, an old man digging potatoes. Characters are called Lydia, Emily and Jonathan, Mary, Dinah and Josh. Stories are played out in a Cotswold village, a school on the Sussex Downs, a London house with an apricot-coloured sofa in its living room.

In the title story a young, newlywed couple moves into an idyllic country cottage. Emma - modest, delicate - is nervous of her older, independent neighbour Harriet, who comes knocking with overtures of proprietorial friendship. Harriet's only companion is a cat called Teddy. Emma's husband Martin, likeably boorish, drinks on Friday nights and sleeps in on Saturdays. Cautiously, the neighbours get to know one another, but - in a beautifully controlled and thoroughly English outcome to the story - it is Teddy that proves to be the catalyst for betrayal.

A beautiful country house is the witness to betrayal of a similar kind in the playfully post-modern 'The Last Word', but this time the tone is different. The male characters are foul-mouthed, antagonistic friends, the female a graceful, balletic English girl, whose wistful memories of bucolic childhood summers drive her husband to distraction.

Robson is good on the resentments we carry with us into old age. In 'Mountains', two women meet for the first time in sixty years. Best friends at school, Eleanor, now widowed, married an ambassador and lived a full and privileged life; Celia became a nun, a betrayal that Eleanor didn't see coming and has never forgiven. As they dine sparingly in an expensive restaurant, Eleanor's grudge is pettily aired, then carefully defused by the irrepressible Celia.

Other stories explore the rudderlessness of retirement; the way in which travel can release deep and unspoken hurts; the arrogant genius of an unusual university student; and the ambiguity of both documentary television and obituary-writing.

Finally, a mention for 'The Observatory by Daylight', the hilarious tale of Raafi's attempt to get hold of an upcoming maths exam from the headmaster's son, wheelchair-bound Timothy. If some of Robson's writing errs on the overwhelmingly descriptive, explaining in McEwan-like detail the thought processes and motivations of the characters, this story is a comic gem: snappy dialogue, a touch of farce and a joyous outcome.

It's what being English is all about.