Anthony Blanche and Boy Mulcaster were at the table where the wine stood.

‘Thank God here’s someone I know,’ said Mulcaster, as I joined them. ‘Girl brought me. Can’t see her anywhere.’

‘She’s given you the slip, my dear, and do you know why? Because you look ridiculously out of place, Mulcaster. It isn’t your kind of party at all; you ought not to be here; you ought to go away, you know, to the Old Hundredth or some lugubrious dance in Belgrave Square.’

‘Just come from one,’ said Mulcaster. ‘Too early for the Old Hundredth. I’ll stay on a bit. Things may cheer up.’

‘I spit on you,’ said Anthony. ‘Let me talk to you, Charles.’

We took a bottle and our glasses and found a corner in another room. At our feet five members of the ‘Black Birds’ orchestra squatted on their heels and threw dice.

‘That one,’ said Anthony, ‘the rather pale one, my dear, conked Mrs Arnold Frickheimer the other morning on the nut, my dear, with a bottle of milk.’

Almost immediately, inevitably, we began to talk of Sebastian.

‘My dear, he’s such a sot. He came to live with me in Marseille last year when you threw him over, and really it was as much as I could stand. Sip, sip, sip like a dowager all day long. And so sly. I was always missing little things, my dear, things I rather liked; once I lost two suits that had arrived from Lesley and Roberts that morning. Of course, I didn’t know it was Sebastian – there were some rather queer fish, my dear, in and out of my little apartment. Who knows better than you my taste for queer fish? Well, eventually, my dear, we found the pawnshop where Sebastian was p-p-popping them and then he hadn’t got the tickets; there was a market for them, too, at the bistro.

‘I can see that puritanical, disapproving look in your eye, dear Charles, as though you thought I had led the boy on. It’s one of Sebastian’s less lovable qualities that he always gives the impression of being l-l-led on – like a little horse at a circus. But I assure you I did everything. I said to him again and again, “Why drink? If you want to be intoxicated there are so many much more delicious things.” I took him to quite the best man; well, you know him as well as I do, Nada Alopov and Jean Luxmore and everyone we know has been to him for years – he’s always in the Regina Bar – and then we had trouble over that because Sebastian gave him a bad cheque – a s-s-stumer, my dear – and a whole lot of very menacing men came round to the flat – thugs, my dear – and Sebastian was making no sense at the time and it was all most unpleasant.’

Boy Mulcaster wandered towards us and sat down, without encouragement, by my side.