Christopher thought that when she let her guard down, Marnie looked a different person. He guessed she must be in her mid or late twenties, but with her fine light-brown hair scraped back in a ponytail and her face devoid of make-up she could have passed for several years younger. He wondered if she had any Slav in her ancestry, something to do with high cheekbones and a wide but finely moulded mouth. Her straight dark eyebrows and thick, dark lashes made a surprising contrast to her very pale skin.

‘What sort of trouble?’ he asked.

Marnie piled butter and honey on to a croissant – obviously weight-watching was not one of her problems. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was Stanley of course, so I guess you could say it was a trouble waiting to happen. He was okay to start with – boring, but okay. The Colonel insisted on standing us all drinks – and there were some pretty fearsome-sounding mixtures on offer, I can tell you! Mostly whisky-based concoctions laced with strange liqueurs and called names like Monarch of the Glen and The Chieftain’s Revenge. Talk about breaking down barriers! Everyone got very garrulous. Even Morwenna became quite skittish, but Stanley soon became more and more belligerent. He was horrible to poor Win, mocking her writing efforts and accusing her of disloyalty to him. We all felt terribly embarrassed. The Colonel tried to intervene but made it worse by saying things like “Remember there are ladies present” and “We don’t want any unpleasantness, do we?”’ Marnie had got the Colonel’s staccato delivery off to a T. She grinned. ‘You could see that Stanley was positively ripe for unpleasantness and the poor old Colonel’s jolly decent old-school-tie-ishness was getting up his nose big time. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so awful. Stanley started shouting about what a ripoff this place was, how Catherine didn’t know good writing when she saw it and the Grants were toffee-nosed parasites. Everyone else in the bar stared at us. Bunty started to sniffle, Morwenna looked as if she’d like to dig a hole and plant herself in it, but Joyce was brilliant – she started buttering Stanley up, massaging his ego and pretending to flirt with him, and managed to get him to quieten down a bit – and then luckily he passed clean out. But I fear there’ll be repercussions today. Did we have problems getting him out to the car! First of all we couldn’t budge him and then he started flailing about. I must say the Colonel was fantastic in the end but you should have come with us. We could have done with another man to help.’