They had long legs, classically rounded Sixties faces - think Patti Boyd, Cathy McGowan, Jean Shrimpton - and the obligatory silky straight hair which flipped magically at the ends. Some girls epitomise a period by the way they look and the gossip columns caught on to the Jays even before they arrived for Fresher week. He wrote from the wreckage of his middle-age - "three failed marriages, emotional dislocation" - to somebody he associated with the bright launching party of his life.But however bright Rupert Pennant-Rea's experience of the Sixties, I can't believe it was as charmed as Helen and Catherine Jay's. According to press reports, his letters to her referred to the shared idealism of the past, their student days together. They did things differently there and how the three protagonists in this drama must wish they were still there. Mary EIlen claims that Rupert first caught her eye in 1976 when he apparently pursued her between marriages one and two, without success But Rupert's memory is different. They had been students together at Trinity College Dublin in the Sixties.Yes, the past is a foreign country.

But she was different from other highly publicised mistresses in one important respect and this must have led him to trust her She came out of an intense part of his past She and her lover had shared roots and values. Mary Ellen Synon must have looked like a class apart from other high-profile mistresses of the tabloids. In the event, she proved to be no more discreet than Bienvenida Buck. Denied the chance of urging him to resign, the columnists stood on their heads and said that puritanism had gone too far. They found it absurd, they said, that a man who had not been elected and had not uttered pompous pronouncement on family values should have to lose his job because of infidelities which, while not admirable, were human and commonplace.I am quite sure that Mr Pennant-Rea didn't see the affair as a resigning matter either - not at first.

Rupert Pennant-Rea was gone before the columnists had time to draw breath and this took them aback. If they could have looked years ahead and seen the photographers on the family doorstep, could they have smiled with such pretty insouciance?There is slightly more to the Pennant-Rea affair than another privileged middle-aged man suffering a temporary career setback because of indiscretion and betrayal. They had already been featured in Tatler, Honey and the Sunday supplements. David Bailey and immortality in a book called Birds of Britain were waiting.

Was this how we thought life would be 29 years ago when we walked up the steps of the Dome in Brighton to collect our degrees, showing as much leg as possible under Biba mini dresses and black academic gowns, secretly glorying in being clever, fanciable and fashionable all at once? The tabloids were there then too, to catch Helen and her sister Catherine at their exit from a high-profile student career which began in black knee-length Anello and Davide boots, took in the Sixties middle- class equivalent of Club 18-30 - Sussex, sociology and sex - and ended in those little Biba dresses. What a relief to open the papers the next day and see a flash of the old Helen, groomed and polished, determinedly power dressed, legs as good as ever, behaving impeccably and all the more impressive for standing on her own two feet and not, like some previous wives in this awful position, pale-faced and trembling in her husband's shadow. Nevertheless, putting a brave face on it is not the same as being the face of a decade. The shock of seeing Helen Pennant-Rea, better known to her peers from the University of Sussex 1963-66 as one half of the Jay twins, was worse than it might have been because the tabloids had caught her so unfairly in the role of wrongfooted wife. Could it possibly be her - rumpled sweatshirt, jeans, glasses, just another faded middle-aged woman in unflattering circumstances? Sic transit a classic Sixties beauty. lT IS always a shock to see somebody you know in a newspaper. There is the moment of uncertainty, the double-take, the disbelief and then the eager scanning of the newsprint to see what it can be about.