He was left alone with Hugo in the chilly dining room. He shifted his legs from under the cloth to bring them closer to the one-bar electric heater. Hugo began to struggle with the cork of a wine bottle. Unable to extract it, he cursed under his breath.

‘Let me try.’

‘I’ll be able to cope quite well, thanks, if you don’t watch me,’ said Hugo sharply, and then, irrelevantly, if you didn’t know nothing those two said was irrelevant, ‘I’m doing a course in accountancy.’

‘As a wine waiter, Hugo,’ said Duncan, ‘you make a very good accountant, ha ha!’

Hugo didn’t laugh. He got the cork out at last. ‘I think I’ll do all right. I was always reasonably good at figures.’

‘So you were, so you were. And more than reasonably good.’ That was true. It had been with personnel that the man was so abysmally bad, giving junior executives and little typists ideas above their station. ‘I’m sure you’ll do well.’

Why didn’t the woman come back? It must have been ten minutes since she had gone off to that kitchen, down those miles of passages. His own wife, long dead, would have got that main course into serving dishes before they had sat down to the hors d’oeuvres.

‘Get a qualification, that’s the thing,’ he said. In the distance he heard the wheels of a trolley coming. It was a more welcome sound than that of the wheels of the train one has awaited for an hour on a cold platform. He didn’t like the woman, but anything was better than being alone with Hugo. Why not get it over now, he thought, before they began on the amazingly small roasted chicken which had appeared? He managed a smile. He said, ‘I can tell you’ve both fallen on your feet. I’m quite sure, Hugo, you’ll look back on all this when you’re a successful accountant and thank God you and Frasers parted company.’

And that ought to be that. They had put him through their inquisition and now perhaps they would let him eat this overcooked mess that passed for dinner in peace. At last they would talk of something else, not leave it to him who had been making the running all the evening.

But instead of conversation, there was a deep silence. No-one seemed to have anything to say. And although Duncan, working manfully at his chicken wing, racked his brains for a topic, he could think of nothing. Their house, his flat, the workpeople at Frasers, his car, the cost of living, her job, Hugo’s course, Christmas past, summer to come, all these subjects must inevitably lead by a direct route back to Hugo’s dismissal. And Duncan saw with irritable despair that all subjects would lead to it because he was he and they were they, and the dismissal lay between them like an unavoidable spectre at their dismal feast. From time to time he lifted his eyes from his plate, hoping she would respond to that famous smile of his, that smile that was growing stiff with insincere use, but each time he looked at her he saw that she was staring fixedly at him, eating hardly anything, her expression concentrated, dispassionate and somehow dogged. And her eyes had lost their kingfisher flash. They were dull and dead like smoky glass.