‘You’ve made it all very nice,’ said Daphne.

‘Well, I always say the flat had the potential and I had the taste. Of course, yours is much smaller and, frankly, I wouldn’t say it lends itself to a very ambitious decor. In your place, the first thing I’d do is have central heating put in.’

‘I expect I will if I can afford it.’

‘You know, Daphne, there are some things we owe it to ourselves to afford. But you know your own business best and I wouldn’t dream of interfering. If the cold gets you down you’re welcome up here at any time. Any time, I mean that. Now this is my drawing room, my pièce de résistance.’

Merle opened the door with the air of a girl lifting the lid of a jewel case that holds a lover’s gift.

‘What a lot of plants,’ said Daphne faintly.

‘I was always mad about plants. My first business venture was a florist’s. I could have made a little goldmine out of that if my partner hadn’t been so wickedly vindictive. She was determined to oust me from the first. D’you like my suite? I had it completely re-done in oyster satin last year and I do think it’s a success.’

The atmosphere was that of a hothouse. The chairs, the sofa, the lamps, the little piecrust tables with their load of bibelots, were islanded in the centre of the large room. No, not an island perhaps, Daphne thought, but a clearing in a tropical jungle. Shelves, window sills, white troughs on white wrought iron legs, were burgeoned with lush trailing growth, green, glossy, frondy, all quite immobile and all giving forth a strange green scent.

‘They take up all my time. It’s not just the watering and watching the temperature and so on. Plants know when you love them. They only flourish in an atmosphere of love. I honestly don’t believe you’d find a better specimen of an opuntia in London than mine. I’m particularly proud of the peperomias and the xygocacti too of course, I expect you’ve seen them growing in their natural habitat with all your mad rushing around those foreign places.’

‘We were mostly in Stockholm and New York, Merle.’

‘Oh, were you? So many years went by when you never bothered to write to me that I really can’t keep pace. I thought about you a lot, of course. I want you to know you really had my sympathy, moving house all the time and that awful divorce from what’s-his-name, and babies to cope with and then getting married again and everything. I used to feel how sad it was that I’d made so much of my life while you . . . What’s the matter?’

‘That plant, Merle, it moved.’

‘That’s because you touched it. When you touch one of its mouths it closes up. It’s called Dionaea Muscipula.’

The plant stood alone in a majolica pot contained in an elaborate white stand. It looked very healthy. It had delicate shiny leaves and from its heart grew five red-gold blossoms. As Daphne peered more closely she saw that these resembled mouths, as Merle had put it, far more than flowers, whiskery mouths, soft and ripe and luscious. One of these was now closed.