The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it. We ate to the music of the press – the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood and marrow, the tap of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast. There was a pause here of a quarter of an hour, while I drank the first glass of the Clos de Bèze and Rex smoked his first cigarette. He leaned back, blew a cloud of smoke across the table, and remarked, ‘You know, the food here isn’t half bad; someone ought to take this place up and make something of it.’

Presently he began again on the Marchmains:

‘I’ll tell you another thing, too – they’ll get a jolt financially soon if they don’t look out.’

‘I thought they were enormously rich.’

‘Well, they are rich in the way people are who just let their money sit quiet. Everyone of that sort is poorer than they were in 1914, and the Flytes don’t seem to realize it. I reckon those lawyers who manage their affairs find it convenient to give them all the cash they want and no questions asked. Look at the way they live – Brideshead and Marchmain House both going full blast, pack of foxhounds, no rents raised, nobody sacked, dozens of old servants doing damn all, being waited on by other servants, and then besides all that there’s the old boy setting up a separate establishment – and setting it up on no humble scale either. D’you know how much they’re overdrawn?’

‘Of course I don’t.’

‘Jolly near a hundred thousand in London. I don’t know what they owe elsewhere. Well, that’s quite a packet, you know, for people who aren’t using their money. Ninety-eight thousand last November. It’s the kind of thing I hear.’

Those were the kind of things he heard, mortal illness and debt, I thought.

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope.

‘I don’t mean that they’ll be paupers; the old boy will always be good for an odd thirty thousand a year, but there’ll be a shake-up coming soon, and when the upper-classes get the wind up, their first idea is usually to cut down on the girls. I’d like to get the little matter of a marriage settlement through, before it comes.’

We had by no means reached the cognac, but here we were on the subject of himself. In twenty minutes I should have been ready for all he had to tell. I closed my mind to him as best I could and gave myself to the food before me, but sentences came breaking in on my happiness, recalling me to the harsh, acquisitive world which Rex inhabited. He wanted a woman; he wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her at his own price; that was what it amounted to.