‘You interest me strangely. By the way, Jock, did you make good your escape last night without any, ah, friction?’

‘Escape?’ he sneered. ‘That lot couldn’t catch VD in Port Said.’

‘Please, Jock. I wish to enjoy my luncheon.’

‘Yeah. Well, cook’s just turned the chops over so you got about four minutes to get downstairs, I reckon.’

I made it. I remember the chops vividly, they were delicious; so were them little French beans.

The afternoon hummed with telephone calls; I felt like W. B. Yeats in his bee-loud glade. First George, who upbraided me sternly, saying that Sonia had been quite frantic at being left alone all night. (‘Pooh’ is what I mentally said to that.) He was full of plans to import the flower of the English Bar to cow the Royal Court of Jersey.

‘Don’t be so damn silly,’ I said; ‘for one thing, they’d probably have no standing here; for another it would take them years to learn the quirks and quiddities of Jersey law. Leave it alone. Trust your Uncle Charlie.’

‘Now, look here, Mortdecai,’ he began. I explained courteously that I never listened to sentences beginning with those words. He started again, and again I had to interrupt him to explain that, although no great churchgoer, I found blasphemy distasteful. He breathed heavily into the instrument for perhaps half a minute. I felt that I should help him.

‘The weather, I believe, is fine for the time of the year, is it not?’

He hung up. I started the Times crossword.

Sam was the next to telephone.

‘Charlie, are you quite insane or do you really know what you’re about? George says you’re talking like a lunatic.’

‘Have I ever let you down?’ I asked simply.

‘Have I ever given you the chance before?’

‘How is Violet?’

‘In complete withdrawal. Diagnosis: not sure. Prognosis: can’t say. Being fed intravenously. Change the subject.’

‘All right. We had chops for luncheon. Come to dinner: Jock is making Aloo Ghosht Bangalore with his own hands.’

‘Charlie, I suppose you realize that if you haven’t got this thing right I may have to disembowel you with my own hands?’

‘Of course. But if I haven’t got it right you may not need to, you see. Come to dinner?’

‘Oh, all right. Eight o’clock?’

‘Come earlier. Let’s get sloshed.’

‘All right.’

Johanna, who had wandered in, said, ‘How nice to have one’s friends in so often.’

‘Tell Jock to put some more potatoes in the curry,’ I said. ‘Dear.’

The next call was the one I was dreading: it was from Jolly Solly my Wonder Solicitor.

‘Ho ho ho!’ he cried happily, rubbing his hands. (He has one of those loudspeaker telephones which leave both hands free – indispensable for confirmed hand-rubbers.) ‘Ho ho! Such an interesting mess as you’re in I never hoped to live to see. Legal history we shall make!’