‘A man?’ said Merle. ‘Another man?’

‘I’ll look out for your taxi and when I see you come in I’ll just pop up and hear all about it, shall I? I’m sorry I can’t . . .’

‘Sorry? Sorry for what? I can collect my handbag by myself. I’m quite used to standing on my own feet.’ The receiver went down with a crash.

Merle had a bath and put on the orange dress. It was rather showy for day wear with its sequins and its fringes, but she could never bear to have a new dress and not wear it at once. The ocelot coat would cover most of it. She watered the peperomias and painted a little leaf gloss on the ivy. The bluebottle had died in the night, but dionaea muscipula didn’t seem to mind. She opened her orange strandy mouths for Merle and devoured the dead bluebottle along with the shreds of fillet steak.

Merle put on her cream silk turban and a long scarf of flame-coloured silk. Her spare mortice key was where she always kept it, underneath the sanseveria pot. She locked the Yale and the mortice and then the taxi took her to the store. Merle sailed into the manager’s office, and when the manager told her he had no secretary, had never phoned her flat and had certainly not found her handbag, she deflated like a fat orange balloon into which someone has stuck a pin.

‘You’ve been the victim of a hoax, Miss Smith.’

Merle pulled herself together. She could always do that, she had superb control. She didn’t want aspirins or brandy or policemen or any of the other aids to quietude offered by the manager. When she had told him he didn’t know his job, that if there was a conspiracy against her – as she was sure there must be – he was in it, she floundered down the stairs and flapped her mouth and her arms for a taxi.

When she got home the first thing that struck her as strange was that the door was only locked on the Yale. She could have sworn she had locked it on the mortice too, but no doubt her memory was playing her tricks – and no wonder, the shock she had had. There was a little bit of earth on the hall carpet. Merle didn’t like that, earth on her gold Wilton. Inside her ocelot she was sweating. She took off her coat and opened the drawing room door.

Daphne saw the taxi come and Merle bounce out of it, an orange orchid springing from a black bandbox. Merle looked wild with excitement, her turban all askew. Daphne smiled to herself and shook her head. She laid the table and finished making the salad she knew her friend would like with his lunch, and then she went upstairs to see Merle.

There was a mirror on each landing. Daphne was so small and thin that she didn’t puff much when she had to climb stairs. As she came to the top of each flight she saw a little grey woman trotting to meet her, a woman with smooth white hair and large, rather diffident, grey eyes, who wore a grey wool dress partly covered by a cloudy stole of lace. She smiled at her reflection. She was old now but she had had her moments, her joy, her gratification, her intense pleasures. And soon there was to be a new pleasure, a confrontation she had looked forward to for weeks. Who could tell what would come of it? With a last smile at her grey and fluttery image, Daphne pushed open the unlatched door of Merle’s flat.