‘I told you: I said so. I said: wouldn’t he take it to the V. and A. And he gave me one of his weird looks; furtive, scared, blank – I don’t know how you’d describe them – and shut up like a clam.’

‘Suspicious in itself!’ Jeremy grinned at his friend and then said: ‘“I would I had been there”.’

‘Well, at that, “it would have much amazed you”.’

‘“Very like. Very like” What do we know about Conducis?’

‘I can’t remember with any accuracy,’ Peregrine said. ‘He’s an alltime-high for money, isn’t he? There was a piece in one of the Sunday supplements some time back. About how he loathes publicity and does a Garbo and leaves Mr Gulbenkian wondering what it was that passed him. And how he doesn’t join in any of the joy and is thought to be a fabulous anonymous philanthropist. A Russian mum, I think it said, and an Anglo-Rumanian papa.’

‘Where does he get his pelf?’

‘I don’t remember. Isn’t it always oil? “Mystery Midas” it was headed and there was a photograph of him looking livid and trying to dodge the camera on the steps of his bank and a story about how the photographer made his kill. I read it at the dentist’s.’

‘Unmarried?’

‘I think so.’

‘How did you part company?’

‘He just walked out of the room. Then his man came in and said the car was waiting to bring me home. He gave me back my revolting, stinking pocket book and said my clothes had gone to the cleaner and were thought to be beyond salvation. I said something about Mr Conducis and the man said Mr Conducis was taking a call from New York and would “quite understand”. Upon which hint, off I slunk. I’d better write a sort of bread-and-butter, hadn’t I?’

‘I expect so. And he owns The Dolphin and is going to pull it down and put up, one supposes, another waffle-iron on the South Bank?’

‘He’s “turning over the idea” in his mind.’

‘May it choke him,’ said Jeremy Jones.

‘Jer,’ Peregrine said. ‘You must go and look at it. It’ll slay you. Wrought iron. Cherubs. Caryatids. A wonderful sort of potpourri of early and mid-Vic and designed by an angel. O God, God when I think of what could be done with it.’

‘And this ghastly old Croesus – ’

‘I know. I know.’

And they stared at each other with the companionable indignation and despair of two young men whose unfulfilled enthusiasms coincide.