‘Seriously, though, I’m afraid I can’t. I’m going out to dinner tonight and I have to fly back to England tomorrow.’

‘That’s too bad.’

‘Well, it’s a great regret to me,’ said Patrick with a wan smile, as he headed quickly for the door.

‘Goodbye, old friend,’ said Earl, with a big wave.

‘Bye now,’ said Patrick, flicking up the collar of his overcoat before he ventured into the rush hour street.

In the black-lacquered hall, opposite the opening doors of the elevator, an African mask gawked from a marble-topped console table. The gilded aviary of a Chippendale mirror gave Patrick a last chance to glance with horror at his fabulously ill-looking face before turning to Mrs Banks, Marianne’s emaciated mother, who stood vampirishly in the elegant gloom.

Opening her arms so that her black silk dress stretched from her wrists to her knees, like bat’s wings, she cocked her head a little to one side, and exclaimed with excrutiated sympathy, ‘Oh, Patrick, we were so sorry to hear your news.’

‘Well,’ said Patrick, tapping the casket he held under his arm, ‘you know how it is: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What the Lord giveth he taketh away. After what I regard, in this case, as an unnaturally long delay.’

‘Is that . . . ?’ asked Mrs Banks, staring round-eyed at the brown-paper bag.

‘My father,’ confirmed Patrick.

‘I must tell Ogilvy we’ll be one more for dinner,’ she said with peals of chic laughter. That was Nancy Banks all over, as magazines often pointed out after photographing her drawing room, so daring but so right.

‘Banquo doesn’t eat meat,’ said Patrick, putting the box down firmly on the hall table.

Why had he said Banquo? Nancy wondered, in her husky inner voice which, even in the deepest intimacy of her own thoughts, was turned to address a large and fascinated audience. Could he, in some crazy way, feel responsible for his father’s death? Because he had wished for it so often in fantasy? God, she had become good at this after seventeen years of analysis. After all, as Dr Morris had said when they were talking through their affair, what was an analyst but a former patient who couldn’t think of anything better to do? Sometimes she missed Jeffrey. He had let her call him Jeffrey during the ‘letting-go process’ that had been brought to such an abrupt close by his suicide. Without even a note! Was she really meeting the challenges of life, as Jeffrey had promised? Maybe she was ‘incompletely analysed’. It was too dreadful to contemplate.

‘Marianne’s dying to see you,’ she murmured consolingly as she led Patrick into the empty drawing room. He stared at a baroque escritoire cascading with crapulous putti.

‘She got a phone call the moment you arrived and couldn’t get out of answering it,’ she added.