Saturday, 21 October, Georgiana's party In 1989, Gorbachev began to dismantle the Soviet Empire, de Klerk took the first steps towards dismantling the apartheid empire, and John Major, trembling, defied Margaret Thatcher, and history began to dismantle the Iron Lady. It was the year the avant-garde slipped quietly back into the ranks, leaving modernism, socialism, radical feminism stranded, and Salman Rushdie at the mercy of the ancient savagery of fundamentalism. In that same year, Lucy, a 26-year-old woman with few friends and an insecure job, found herself at the fringes of the small and private world of Georgiana's parties. And so, on Saturday 21 October, in 1989, that year of many endings, another dismantling began.