“Well, I just suddenly wanted to see you. I haven’t seen you since before I went away.” Lucia lowered her voice. “Lord, do you still have Mrs. Fanshaw? Marvelous name. Like an eighteenth-century courtesan.”

“Which she probably was.” Morgan closed the door behind them and called out, “Oh—Mrs. Fanshaw. Miss McKitterick’s here. Will we be in your way in the living room?”

Mrs. Fanshaw appeared in the bedroom door, tall, queenly, with a lacy cap of curled white hair. “Not,” she said, “at the mo.”

Lucia was pulling a pin out of her straw hat, and turned her head sideways to murmur a greeting.

“Morning, Madam,” Mrs. Fanshaw said, only just smiling back. “Well, sir, in a little I might come and finish in the kitchen, if that won’t bother you. I won’t be more than five minutes, at the outmost.” She often improved upon shopworn phrases in this way.

“Fine,” said Morgan. He followed Lucia into the living room. She sat on the sofa, her discarded hat on one side of her and Morgan on the other. She shook out her fair hair. Her dress spread about her in flowered folds.

“You’re quite brown,” he said. “Where did you get that?”

She looked at her bare arm as if she had never seen it before. “I can’t be. The weather was very bad till we got to Yugoslavia.”

He was silent for a moment. He wondered how he could ever have imagined that she had taken the trip alone. “Weather’s been remarkably good here,” he said.

“Oh, this morning was glorious. If I hadn’t been feeling so utterly—demoralized, I would have walked through the Gardens.”

“How did you come, then?” He had a sensation of evading the issue.

“In a taxi.”

“You could have taken a No. 29 and got off at Palace Gate.”

“Well I didn’t.”

“Will you have some tea?” He got up and went into the kitchen, which opened off the living room. “It’s all ready.” He brought the tray out and put it on a low table in front of her. “I’ll see if there are some biscuits around.”

She heard him opening cupboards in the kitchen. She looked about, at the handsome old furniture, which had belonged to his mother, at a wall of sagging bookshelves and a litter of papers on shaky little tables like the one before her. The teapot and the pitcher, silver, were magnificent; there was an enamel saucepan of hot water, cups without matching saucers, and a single spoon. “What about sugar?” she called.

He came back holding a tartan tin and a glass bowl half filled with encrusted sugar. “Will you pour?”

She had to use a fold of her dress to protect her fingers from the heat of the handle. “But in Yugoslavia it was fine,” she said. “The weather, I mean. Don’t you have a strainer?”

“God no. Of course not.”