Nanny did not particularly wish to be talked to; she liked visitors best when they paid no attention to her and let her knit away, and watch their faces and think of them as she had known them as small children; their present goings-on did not signify much beside those early illnesses and crimes.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you are looking peaky. I expect it’s all that foreign food doesn’t agree with you. You must fatten up now you’re back. Looks as though you’d been having some late nights, too, by the look of your eyes – dancing, I suppose.’ (It was ever Nanny Hawkins’s belief that the upper classes spent most of their leisure evenings in the ballroom.) ‘And that shirt wants darning. Bring it to me before it goes to the wash.’

Sebastian certainly did look ill; five months had wrought the change of years in him. He was paler, thinner, pouchy under the eyes, drooping in the corners of his mouth, and he showed the scars of a boil on the side of his chin; his voice seemed flatter and his movements alternately listless and jumpy; he looked down-at-heel, too, with clothes and hair, which formerly had been happily negligent, now unkempt; worst of all, there was a wariness in his eye which I had surprised there at Easter, and which now seemed habitual to him.

Restrained by this wariness I asked him nothing of himself, but told him instead about my autumn and winter. I told him about my rooms in the Île Saint-Louis and the art school, and how good the old teachers were and how bad the students.

‘They never go near the Louvre,’ I said, ‘or, if they do, it’s only because one of their absurd reviews has suddenly “discovered” a master who fits in with that month’s aesthetic theory. Half of them are out to make a popular splash like Picabia; the other half quite simply want to earn their living doing advertisements for Vogue and decorating night clubs. And the teachers still go on trying to make them paint like Delacroix.’

‘Charles,’ said Cordelia, ‘Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?’

‘Great bosh.’

‘Oh, I’m so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said we shouldn’t try and criticize what we didn’t understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.’

Presently it was time for Cordelia to go to her supper, and for Sebastian and me to go down to the drawing-room for our cocktails. Brideshead was there alone, but Wilcox followed on our heels to say to him: ‘Her Ladyship would like to speak to you upstairs, my Lord.’

‘That’s unlike mummy, sending for anyone. She usually lures them up herself.’

There was no sign of the cocktail tray. After a few minutes Sebastian rang the bell. A footman answered. ‘Mr Wilcox is upstairs with her Ladyship.’

‘Well, never mind, bring in the cocktail things.’