A few old friends retreated into Lydia and Zach’s new place next door. They’d moved in a few weeks ago. Isobel was asleep upstairs with Grace; they had paid a babysitter for the duration of the party, a nice teenager – Alex walked her home, she only lived around the corner. They weren’t any of them habituated yet to the new rooms – glass and steel fitted cleverly inside the lovely old forms, blond parquet floors restored, a new spiral stair, features made of the great chapel desk and the stone sink in the kitchen, huge as a cattle trough, with its brass tap. It was like staying in somebody else’s house which you coveted madly, Christine said: you found yourself playing at being the somebody else. They were all showing off, in the unfamiliar spaces – and they were suddenly shivering too, exhausted from socialising. Christine, going up to check on the children, swayed from the door jamb dizzily: the little girls were flung in sweetly unconscious disorder in their sleep, Grace on her tummy with her arms up in surrender, Isobel curled around herself protectively. When Alex got back from dropping off the sitter he lit a fire in the new wood-burner, crouching on his heels in front of its window in his smart suit, jacket undone and tie loose, hands hanging between his knees, watching the flames take hold. — You’re like primitive man, Alex, the fire-maker, Jane Ogden admired. He flashed his palms at her, filthy with ash and charcoal, mock-threatening, then went to wash. The women eased out of their shoes, groaning. Zachary came in dangling a choice of bottles at them – which? More champagne or Armagnac or both?

He threw his bag of weed at Nathan Kearney, for rolling up. Coffee, coffee, they all insisted. But Zachary poured them out spirits with their coffee, something very sweet made of rose petals and flavoured with bergamot, the kind of thing that Alex would never usually have touched, but he drank it too because they were all under the spell of the occasion. All of them were drunk already, anyway: on the glamour of their success, Zachary’s success, as well as on the champagne. — Hari said such good things about you! Zachary put his arm around Christine, stretching his feet in their crimson socks out towards the stove; she arranged her own bare feet – nice enough, with their high arches and aristocratic long second toe – alongside his. Her toenails were elegantly painted for once, in a crimson that happened to match his socks. They were all sprawled across cushions on the thick Turkish rugs in front of the stove, holding out their hands to its warmth which melted and unknotted them invidiously and deliciously. Lydia, sitting upright with her back to the sofa, was the only one still alert, turning her head in her deliberate way towards whoever was speaking. The gossip went on desultorily. But one by one, once the coffee was finished, people were bound to make their farewells – even Jane Ogden, even Nathan – until only the four of them were left.