‘I’m fine. Let me take your coat. I’ll take it into the kitchen and dry it. Hugo’s in the sitting room. You know your way, don’t you?’

Down a long passage, he remembered, that was never properly lighted and wasn’t heated at all. The whole place cried out for central heating. He was by now extremely cold and he couldn’t help thinking of his flat where the radiators got so hot that you had to open the windows even in February and where, had he been at home, his housekeeper would at this moment be placing before him a portion of hot pâté to be followed by Poulet San Josef. Elizabeth Crouch, he recalled, was rather a poor cook.

Outside the sitting room door he paused, girding himself for the encounter. He hadn’t set eyes on Hugo Crouch since the man had marched out of the office in a huff because he, Duncan Fraser, chairman of Frasers, had tentatively suggested he might be happier in another job. Well, the sooner the first words were over the better. Very few men in his position, he thought, would let the matter weigh on their minds at all or have his sensitivity. Very few, for that matter, would have come.

He would be genial, casual, perhaps a little avuncular. Above all, he would avoid at any cost the subject of Hugo’s dismissal. They wouldn’t be able to make him talk about it if he was determined not to; ultimately, the politeness of hosts to guest would put up a barrier to stop them. He opened the door, smiling pleasantly, achieving a merry twinkle in his eye. ‘Well, here I am, Hugo! I’ve made it.’

Hugo wore a very sour look, the kind of look Duncan had often seen on his face when some more than usually extravagant order or request of his had been countermanded. He didn’t smile. He gave Duncan his hand gravely and asked him what he would like to drink.

Duncan looked quickly around the room, which hadn’t changed and was still furnished with rather grim Victorian pieces. There was, at any rate, a huge fire of logs burning in the grate. ‘Ah, yes, a drink,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. He didn’t dare ask for whisky, which he would have liked best, because his doctor had forbidden it. ‘A little dry Vermouth?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t have any Vermouth.’

This rejoinder, though spoken quite lightly, though he had even expected something of the sort, gave Duncan a slight shock. It put him on his mettle and yet it jolted him. He had known, of course, that they would start on him, but he hadn’t anticipated the first move coming so promptly. All right, let the man remind him he couldn’t afford fancy drinks because he had lost his job. He, Duncan, wouldn’t be drawn. ‘Sherry, then,’ he said. ‘You do have sherry?’

‘Oh, yes, we have sherry.’ Hugo said. ‘Come and sit by the fire.’

As soon as he was seated in front of those blazing logs and had begun to thaw out, he decided to pursue the conversation along the lines of the weather. It was the only subject he could think of to break the ice until Elizabeth came in, and they were doing quite well at it, moving into such sidelines as floods in East Anglia and crashes in motorway fog, when she appeared and sat next to him.