What I did was, I made a stiff drink of gin and orange juice and tonic, such as I knew Sonia loved, and carried it up to the bedroom, administering it with many a ‘there, there, child’. Then I went downstairs and made a similar confection for myself, except that it was made of whisky and soda. Then I had another which tasted even better and gave me enough lightning-like decision to go across the courtyard and find Sam.

‘Sam,’ I said, when he answered my knock, ‘there is trouble across the way.’

‘Only trouble?’ he said. ‘It sounded like a steam traction-engine rally. I nearly went over but I thought it impertinent to interfere in what might be a private argument.’

I outlined the situation to him and he went to fetch Violet from the other end of the house. Her face was red and tear-stained and I cocked an inquiring eyebrow,

‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘it’s just the crabs.’

‘The crabs?’ I cried, shocked by such candour. ‘My dear, how ever did you catch them?’

‘I didn’t. The plumber did.’

‘You are weeping because the plumber has contracted crabs?’

Sam would ordinarily have let this go on, relishing Violet’s tangled thought-patterns, but time pressed.

‘The plumber,’ he explained, ‘is a keen sea-fisher, as they all are here. He has today given us two fine shanker crabs, alive alive-oh. Violet is boiling them and the sound of their knocking on the saucepan-lid fills her with compassion. Hinc illae lachry-mae.’

Violet smiled sweetly, vacantly, through her tears.

A minute later we were at Les Cherche-fuites, where all was going as merrily as a wedding-bell. George was covered with mud, bits of wistaria and gravel-rash, and was making grating, brigadier-like noises into the telephone. Sonia was striking well-raped attitudes reminiscent of Emma Hamilton portraying Lucrece, and was fetching huge and unbecoming sobs up from deep in her thorax. Violet rushed to her and went into the ‘there, there’ and ‘now, now’ routine but to no avail, for Sonia merely shifted into the higher register. Violet steered her firmly off to the bathroom to wash her face or whatever women do for each other in times of stress.

George subsided into an armchair, glaring at the tumbler of Scotch I had pressed into his hand.

‘Bloody swine,’ he growled. ‘Raped my wife. Ruined my wistaria.’

‘I’ll send my man round first thing in the morning to have a look at it,’ said Sam. ‘The wistaria I mean. They’re very tenacious things – soon recover. Wistaria,’ he added; gratuitously, it seemed to me. I started to tiptoe out: I love dramas but I am no sort of horticulturalist.

‘Don’t go,’ said George.

‘No, don’t go,’ said Sam.

I didn’t go, I hadn’t really wanted to. I wondered whether George had forgotten about the half of a cold duck and bottle of Fleurie. I helped myself to a little more of his Scotch.