‘Any sign of Sebastian?’ he asked.

‘There won’t be,’ I said, ‘until he needs money.’

‘It’s a bit thick, going off like that. I was rather hoping that if I made a good job of him, it might do me a bit of good in another direction.’

He plainly wished to talk of his own affairs; they could wait, I thought, for the hour of tolerance and repletion, for the cognac; they could wait until the attention was blunted and one could listen with half the mind only; now in the keen moment when the maâtre d’hôtel was turning the blinis over in the pan, and, in the background, two humbler men were preparing the press, we would talk of myself.

‘Did you stay long at Brideshead? Was my name mentioned after I left?’

‘Was it mentioned? I got sick of the sound of it, old boy. The Marchioness got what she called a “bad conscience” about you. She piled it on pretty thick, I gather, at your last meeting.’

‘ “Callously wicked”, “wantonly cruel”.’

‘Hard words.’

‘ “It doesn’t matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.” ’

‘Eh?’

‘A saying.’

‘Ah.’ The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed, separating each glaucous bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.

‘I like a bit of chopped onion with mine,’ said Rex. ‘Chap-who-knew told me it brought out the flavour.’

‘Try it without first,’ I said. ‘And tell me more news of myself.’

‘Well, of course, Greenacre, or whatever he was called – the snooty don – he came a cropper. That was well received by all. He was the blue-eyed boy for a day or two after you left. Shouldn’t wonder if he hadn’t put the old girl up to pitching you out. He was always being pushed down our throats, so in the end Julia couldn’t bear it any more and gave him away.’

‘Julia did?’

‘Well, he’d begun to stick his nose into our affairs, you see. Julia spotted he was a fake, and one afternoon when Sebastian was tight – he was tight most of the time – she got the whole story of the Grand Tour out of him. And that was the end of Mr Samgrass. After that the Marchioness began to think she might have been a bit rough with you.’

‘And what about the row with Cordelia?’

‘That eclipsed everything. That kid’s a walking marvel – she’d been feeding Sebastian whisky right under our noses for a week. We couldn’t think where he was getting it. That’s when the Marchioness finally crumbled.’

The soup was delicious after the rich blinis – hot, thin, bitter, frothy.

‘I’ll tell you a thing, Charles, that Ma Marchmain hasn’t let on to anyone. She’s a very sick woman. Might peg out any minute. George Anstruther saw her in the autumn and put it at two years.’

‘How on earth do you know?’

‘It’s the kind of thing I hear. With the way her family are going on at the moment, I wouldn’t give her a year. I know just the man for her in Vienna. He put Sonia Bamfshire on her feet when everyone including Anstruther had despaired of her. But Ma Marchmain won’t do anything about it. I suppose it’s something to do with her crack-brain religion, not to take care of the body.’