‘It isn’t the line, it’s me. We’ve had terrible news, and I can’t deal with myself, let alone with Arnold. We’re at the flat.’

‘I’ll be with you as soon as I can get there.’

Simon had seen Marianne pale. ‘What on earth is the matter?’

She had replaced the receiver and was staring down at it.

‘Take a sip of this,’ he said, bringing her glass of brandy.

‘I can and must pull myself together without it,’ she said, managing to do so. ‘I’ve had a lot of wine tonight and I’m going to need a clear head. My nephew is ill, Simon. I didn’t let myself believe he might be a victim of Aids. That was his mother on the phone and her voice was enough to tell me that Matthew has it.’

She mustered a wan smile. ‘What an end to a memorable evening. And I must now go where I’m needed—’

Simon’s response was neither the awkwardness nor the repugnance with which many would have greeted Marianne’s revelation that the late-twentieth-century plague had touched her family.

‘Come on. I’ll drive you there,’ he said.

Though not taking her own car would mean having to call a cab for the return journey, she accepted Simon’s offer, which seemed to her a display of moral support boding well for their relationship.

‘I met Matthew at the dinner party,’ he reminded her when they were driving down Haverstock Hill, ‘and I liked him.’

‘You also met Pete, with whom he’s lived for years. And the idea of infidelity on the part of either of them—’ Marianne voiced her thoughts. ‘Well, I’m finding it hard to believe.’

‘But gay couples are no less human than the hetero equivalent,’ said Simon. ‘One of the few faithful marriages I know of, back home, was recently hit by Aids. The wife imbibed more than usual at one of the out of town sales conference shindigs her job lets her in for and woke up in bed with some guy.’

‘Did she tell her husband?’

‘I doubt it. But he sure found out when she passed on to him what was passed on to her.’

‘It would have to be something of the kind that got Matthew or Pete in bed with a stranger.’

‘And Pete will be a lucky guy if the tests he’ll now have to have don’t prove positive.’

When Marianne arrived at the Westminster flat, Arnold opened the door and Lyn, red-eyed with weeping, stumbled into her arms.

‘Much good it will do for you to come to me with your sympathy,’ said her brother.

Marianne, her arm around Lyn, followed him into the claustrophobic room in which he had spent more of his life than in the house in Manchester he still called home.