‘Would you like to go in through the French windows and help yourself to some food,’ they said, moving among the guests, smiling and kissing. Ho and his two helpers had placed plate after plate of delicious-looking food on long tables in the huge sitting room: crispy won tons, crispy duck and pancakes and spring onions and plum sauce, chicken cooked in lemon, vegetarian spring rolls, fried prawns, sweet and sour pork, large bowls of rice. Everyone was used to how hungry actors always were but even the directors and the writers and the casting directors swooned and fell upon the culinary delights. Bottle after empty wine bottle piled up in a corner of the kitchen; there was already a crate of empty champagne bottles outside the kitchen door. As if on cue, Mr Cooper the vintner arrived: ‘Just in case,’ he said to Pauline innocently, a large case of wine held out in front of him as he suddenly stared in amazement at Iona Spring under the oak tree.

‘But – I’ve just been reading about her in my newspaper not half an hour ago,’ he said unbelievingly to Pauline, ‘all about being married to that rapist and all the drinking parties and that, and how he wouldn’t let her wear knickers.’ He still held the heavy case of wine as if he’d forgotten he was carrying it in the shock of clapping eyes on a film star.

‘Well why don’t you put that case down and go and introduce yourself to her?’ said Pauline smiling at him, and the vintner, unable to believe his good fortune, pushed his way through the crowds.

And Pauline, looking around her very successful garden party, saw how some of the very successful men, the directors and the writers, had again formed a little group now around Joseph Wain. Where the real power was.

*

Harry Donaldson popped a fried prawn into his mouth as he made up a plate of food that he hoped would interest Michael. He turned, with the plate, to see Portia Bonham – Anthony and Pauline’s oldest child – walk out through the French windows and into the crowded, sunny garden. She was wearing a white dress and she stood there for a moment, surveying the scene. Harry, watching her, put the plate of food back on to one of the long tables, not knowing he did so. As Portia, tall and thin, stood there in her white dress, so still, so – disdainful, almost as though the scene angered her – Harry felt a kind of odd falling feeling in his head, a memory of a night long ago that he didn’t want to remember. The white dress and the anger. He closed his eyes briefly. As he opened them he saw Portia lift her hand, wave to somebody, move gracefully across the grass. Harry rubbed his hand across his face, turned back to the food.

*