‘The pals I got drunk with now have a lot of demands on their time, as I do,’ she told Arnold, ‘and one or two are very big names. We still keep in touch though and manage to meet occasionally. After my return to London I wasn’t short of invitations to dinner or whatever, but I didn’t expect it to be maintained. I know what their working lives are like, and so is mine.’

‘I am neither feeling a chill, nor have I yet reached the peak of my ambition,’ Arnold harked back.

Which has to be a baronetcy, thought Marianne. And why not, for a man to whom the influential people he entertained were nothing more to him than stepping stones?

She glanced at her wristwatch and said impatiently, ‘Your guests seem to have decided en masse to make a late entrance!’

‘Including the two I was coerced into inviting! If Pete puts his arm around Matthew’s shoulders this evening, as I saw him do at Laura’s, I shall die of shame—’

‘There was once a time,’ said Marianne, ‘when even you would’ve thought nothing of it. Unfortunately we’re now living in an era when interpreting something so casual is influenced by the eye of the beholder, and that coloured by the anti-gay propaganda I’m sure you approve of.’

‘It’s the eye of the beholders I’m worried about! Including the chap I’m considering to ghost my memoirs. If he rumbles those two—’

Marianne cut short her brother’s distasteful words. ‘One more remark like that, Arnold, and I shall leave you high and dry, wait for Matthew and Pete in the lobby, and take them out for an evening all three of us would enjoy.’

The woman Marianne had watched head for the powder room emerged wearing tights of a different shade and entered the bar to join a group of couples standing with champagne glasses in their hands and animated smiles on their faces. Had she rushed in to a late-night pharmacy and grabbed some replacement tights from the stand those places all seemed to have for such emergencies?

Such are the observations and conjectures of my trade, Marianne reflected dryly. Even on a night out – and what an experience this one might prove to be – a novelist doesn’t stop working. Was the woman widowed, or divorced? Feeling somewhat out of things, as I’ve been known to when with a party of couples—

Arnold prodded her from her musing. ‘Would you believe it, the first thing Matthew asked me after accepting the invitation was would his mother be there.’