I didn’t answer, but poured her out her usual medicinal dose of brandy. “Just enough to wet the bottom of the glass,” I said, as I always did. Sometimes I made jokes about using an eye-dropper next time; but just now I wasn’t in a joking mood.

“You might as well tell me,” she said.

I brought the drinks over to the coffee-table. “I was thinking how pretty you look in that new dress.”

That was true enough; the dress was bright red with a button-through front; the kind that only a pretty young woman with black hair and a good figure could get away with. She crossed her legs; she had good knees, neither too thin nor too fat. It isn’t many pretty young women whose knees live up to the rest of them; without thinking, I leaned down and kissed each in turn.

“Wicked!” she said.

I pulled up her skirt a little; she pushed me away gently. “Mark’s coming in for a drink, soon,” she said.

My hand returned to her skirt. “He can watch us. Do him a world of good.”

“Don’t be horrid,” she said.

I laughed. “It’s Sybil it’d do a world of good to, actually. Mark doesn’t talk much about it, but from what he’s let slip, your dear cousin’s no bargain in bed.”

“They’ve three young children.”

“Ah, come off it. He probably raped her. Or put something in her tea.”

“You really are revolting,” she said. But her cheeks were flushed a little and she wasn’t bothering to push her skirt back; look­ing at her it was obvious she wasn’t like Sybil, and I felt, along with desire, an uprush of tenderness. She wasn’t the Browns’ daughter; she was my wife. And unlike other men’s wives she desired me physically. I looked in the direction of the sofa. That had been one of the great pleasures of married life; to make love at other times than night, at other places than in bed. In the bath, in the car, on country walks, wherever in fact we had as much as a quarter of an hour alone together; we’d pretend that we weren’t married, pretend to be star-crossed lovers. And I, though I’d never told her, had sometimes pretended that she was married to some­one else, to one of the men whom she might have married, one of the Jaguar and Porsche set like Jack Wales. Or like Ralph Lumley. Thinking of him made me think of Brown; I swallowed my whisky at one gulp and went over to the sideboard again.

“I’m not revolting,” I said. “Sybil finds sex revolting, that’s all. No wonder Mark strays—”

“They say she didn’t use to find sex revolting,” Susan said. “She was quite gay once.” She giggled. “Awfully gay with all and sundry. Can you imagine it?”

“People change,” I said.

“There was a big scandal,” Susan said. “They had a party when her parents were away and it got out of hand. Mummy told me a bit about it. . . .”