The consular porter strode arrogantly ahead with his light swinging and his tall cane banging; sometimes an open doorway revealed a silent group seated in golden lamplight round a brazier.

‘Very dirty peoples,’ the porter said scornfully, over his shoulder. ‘No education. French leave them dirty. Not like British peoples. My peoples,’ he said, ‘always very British peoples.’

For he was from the Sudan Police, and regarded this ancient centre of his culture as a New Zealander might regard Rome.

At length we came to the last of many studded doors, and the porter beat on it with his stick.

‘British Lord’s house,’ he said.

Lamplight and a dark face appeared at the grating. The consular porter spoke peremptorily; bolts were withdrawn and we entered a small courtyard with a well in its centre and a vine trained overhead.

‘I wait here,’ said the porter. ‘You go with this native fellow.’

I entered the house, down a step and into the living-room I found a gramophone, an oil-stove and, between them, a young man. Later, when I looked about me, I noticed other, more agreeable things – the rugs on the floor, the embroidered silk on the walls, the carved and painted beams of the ceiling, the heavy, pierced lamp that hung from a chain and cast soft shadows of its own tracery about the room. But on first entering these three things, the gramophone for its noise – it was playing a French record of a jazz band – the stove for its smell, and the young man for his wolfish look, struck my senses. He was lolling in a basket chair, with a bandaged foot stuck forward on a box; he was dressed in a kind of thin, mid-European imitation tweed with a tennis shirt open at the neck; the unwounded foot wore a brown canvas shoe. There was a brass tray by his side on wooden legs, and on it were two beer bottles, a dirty plate, and a saucer full of cigarette ends; he held a glass of beer in his hand and a cigarette lay on his lower lip and stuck there when he spoke. He had long fair hair combed back without a parting and a face that was unnaturally lined for a man of his obvious youth; one of his front teeth was missing, so that his sibilants came sometimes with a lisp, sometimes with a disconcerting whistle, which he covered with a giggle; the teeth he had were stained with tobacco and set far apart.

This was plainly the ‘thoroughly bad hat’ of the consul’s description, the film footman of Anthony’s.

‘I’m looking for Sebastian Flyte. This is his house, is it not?’ I spoke loudly to make myself heard above the dance music, but he answered softly in English fluent enough to suggest that it was now habitual to him.

‘Yeth. But he isn’t here. There’s no one but me.’

‘I’ve come from England to see him on important business. Can you tell me where I can find him?’