I put my arm round her shoulder and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin tasted of powder and fatigue and her up-swept hair straggled at the nape; she was only three years older than Mark but at the moment she looked far more than that; she was one of those fair, delicate-featured women whose good looks fade almost overnight, who go to bed young women and wake up matrons.

“I’ve got the cure for you, love,” I said. “Don’t worry your pretty little head, I’ve got the cure.”

“For me, too, I hope,” Mark said as they followed me into the drawing-room. “I’ve been coping with the little fiends, too.”

“For both of you,” I said.

“They’ve been playing Night Clubs,” Sybil said. “Lisa’s simply frantic. I’m afraid we won’t keep her much longer.” She sighed. “Oh God, these bloody foreign girls! Where’ve all the good ser­vants got to?”

“They never existed,” said Mark. “It’s a legend, a beautiful bourgeois legend.”

He looked at the sideboard. “Ah, my cure’s coming along splen­didly. Nothing with it, Joe, thank you.”

He looked more than usually spruce this evening; though it was still raining there was no trace of it on his person. But there was mud on Sybil’s shoes and the neck of her purple dress was dark with moisture. She was unlucky in that way, unlucky in the minor things, an attractor of small annoyances; Mark was one of the lucky ones, one of those who walked though the rain with­out getting wet, who ate and drank just what he liked with­out putting on weight, whose dark good looks would be un­changed twenty years from now. He’d always been able to attract women all his life. Or rather, stupid young girls, I reminded my­self sourly. Then I caught sight of myself in the mirror across the room, and felt a spasm of envy; my spare tyre was becoming too pronounced to be funny and my face was beginning to be blurred by fat.

Susan came into the room, her hair brushed and her dress buttoned up and her seams straight, completely the respectable and tidy hostess, but on her face the unmistakable satisfaction of a woman who had recently made love. She might as well have said as much; I noticed that Sybil, after the first glance, turned her eyes away from her. But Mark’s face betrayed his envy; for a moment he looked all of his forty years. I leaned back in my chair smiling and poured myself another whisky.

3

Tiffield was in high good humour. So he should have been; I’d given him a lunch which would have fed a family of ten, I’d taken him to a strip-club afterwards, and now here we were in the American Bar at the Savoy knocking back double Martinis and devouring olives and potato crisps, as he would have de­voured anything that was free; I was content to watch him, rather queasily.

“The black ones are best,” he said, putting the last of a saucer­ful in his mouth. “The oil renews the stomach lining.” He looked at me sorrowfully, as if making some weighty pronouncement about sin or nuclear warfare.