Frances and Emmy Lou and Harry had, after conferring with Pauline yesterday, brought Michael. He was thin and gaunt, had no hair now. Michael had been, for a while, one of Harry’s live-in lovers, a beautiful boy of seventeen when Harry was already over thirty. He’d been a dancer in the first production of Cats; when he’d got too old to dance he’d become an under-manager in the linen department of one of the big London department stores. He was dying of Aids.

‘Hello Michael,’ said Anthony warmly, ‘good to see you old son,’ and Pauline kissed him, took his arm, walked with him, very slowly, into the garden.

The female host of a chat-show, whom everyone disliked intensely, arrived with her new lover. Anthony smiled and kissed her and said how pleased he was that she was able to come (and Pauline observed how put out she was to see Iona Spring sitting under the oak tree). But the chat-show hostess was soon surrounded by her own coterie: people hoping to be asked to appear on her programme.

Izzy Fields tripped in behind them with her schoolteacher husband and her youngest son, Lysander, and her safety helmet.

‘Bet you didn’t come on your bike all the way to Chiswick from Tufnell Park,’ someone called cheerily to Izzy, and she surprised them all by calling back, ‘Yes I did. Peter came on later with Lysander. It was absolutely lovely cycling along the tow path at Hammersmith, I so enjoyed it.’ People shook their heads in wonderment, guiltily lit another cigarette; Izzy Fields was a character, she must be nearly sixty, surely.

The garden was soon full of people holding glasses and talking loudly, seeing who they could see, the atmosphere heightened even further as one by one people realised that Iona Spring was sitting under the oak tree in dark glasses drinking champagne and orange juice. Many of the visitors didn’t actually know her, only recognised her, whispered to each other, that’s his third wife while young children ran down the lawn to Benedict’s Smartie computer and the river. A well-known television director who suffered from asthma was surrounded by younger women because he was casting a new series about beauty contests. Directors from the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company stood in the sunshine, earnest men huddled together with the ones with whom they were on speaking terms; actors crowded around them. And, in one corner of the garden, another group of directors laughed together, the new power: the women.

There seemed to be two topics of conversation: the main one of course was work, who was doing what, who had seen what, plans, intrigues, gossip, but most people also looked at Iona Spring out of the corner of their eye and speculated about Terence Blue.