Oddly enough, the delusions which had enabled her to marry Victor had really started on that evening. During the next few months Victor immersed himself in the creation of his new book, Being, Knowing, and Judging, so easily (and yet so wrongly!) confused with its predecessor, Thinking, Knowing, and Judging. Victor’s claim that he wanted to keep his students ‘on their toes’ by giving his books such similar titles had not altogether extinguished Anne’s doubts or those of his publisher. Nevertheless, like a masterful broom, his new book had scattered the dust long settled on the subject of identity, and swept it into exciting new piles.

At the end of this creative surge Victor had proposed to Anne. She had been thirty-four and, although she didn’t know it at the time, her admiration for Victor was at its peak. She had accepted him, not only because he was imbued with that mild celebrity which is all a living philosopher can hope for, but also because she believed that Victor was a good man.

What the hell was she going to say to Patrick, she wondered as she took a spinach-green majolica plate from Barbara’s fabulous collection and arranged the cakes on its irregularly glazed surface.

It was no use pretending to Patrick that she had liked David Melrose. Even after his divorce from Eleanor, when he was poor and ill, David had been no more endearing than a chained Alsatian. His life was an unblemished failure and his isolation terrifying to imagine, but he still had a smile like a knife; and if he had tried to learn (talk about a mature student!) how to please people, his efforts were faintly repulsive to anyone who knew his real nature.

As she leaned over an annoyingly low Moroccan table in the drawing room, Anne felt her dark glasses slip from the top of her head. Perhaps her yellow cotton dress was a little too upbeat for the occasion, but what the hell? Patrick had not seen her recently enough to tell that she had dyed her hair. No doubt Barbara Wilson would have let it go naturally grey, but Anne had to appear on television tomorrow night to talk about ‘The New Woman’. While she had been trying to find out what on earth a New Woman might be, she had got a New hairstyle and bought a New dress. It was research and she wanted expenses.

Twenty to four. Dead time until he arrived. Time to light a lethal, cancer-causing cigarette, time to fly in the face of the Surgeon General’s advice – as if you could trust a man who was a surgeon and a general at the same time. She called that working both sides of the street. There was no disguising it, though, she did feel guilty, but then she felt guilty putting three drops of bath essence into the water instead of two. So what the hell?