‘We did invite Angela Dee didn’t we?’ called Anthony, slightly hungover by the French windows.

‘Yes, yes, I checked all the casting directors,’ whooped Viola, ‘you asked all the casting directors who’d ever employed you from that list in your study and a whole lot of the new young ones as well.’

‘Don’t shout,’ said Anthony.

Pauline put more glasses on the tables on the flat part of the lawn at the top of the garden before it sloped down to the river. The voice of Tom Waits echoed soulfully and almost but not quite out of tune from the sitting room, where the Sunday papers, already rumpled by Anthony, lay on one of the sofas.

‘Look at this crap,’ he called, waving one of the papers at them on the lawn, ‘the appalling Iona Spring has revealed to the world that Terence liked her to wear no knickers. Do we need to know this? I ask myself, and even Elvira is featured, in her spectacles.’

Exotic smells wafted from the kitchen where Ho had begun cooking in earnest, helped now by two Chinese women he’d brought with him at 9 am. Benedict appeared, yawning.

‘Any breakfast?’

‘Have you had a shower?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘What are you going to wear?’

‘This.’

‘Over my dead body,’ said Anthony.

‘Go and get some Weetabix,’ called Pauline.

‘Weetabix?’ queried Benedict in disgust.

‘Weetabix,’ said Pauline firmly. Benedict wandered off but Pauline saw him look carefully at himself in the long mirror by the French windows.

‘And don’t forget,’ she called after him, ‘to check that the Smartie machine still works, I’ve put it down by the river.’ Benedict had invented a little machine that dispensed Smarties when buttons were pressed in a certain order, to entertain visiting children (and to introduce them, he said, to computer basics). Some of the actors of Anthony’s generation were on their second or even third families and brought their latest offspring to such occasions, with their young, young wives.

Pauline’s mother, the ex tap-dance champion, frail now and a widow but who wouldn’t miss a garden party while she could stand upright – an event less and less likely by three in the afternoon, had already arrived and had already had a drink with Anthony. Rather unsteadily she laid piles of plates, and forks wrapped in serviettes. She used one hand, holding her glass rather gaily in the air with the other. She and Viola were discussing a Hollywood movie about the life of George Sanders which had recently been on the television. I knew him y’know Vi, Mrs O’Brien was saying, I did the foxtrot with him once in the Café Royale. She was just giving a little foxtrot demonstration along the carpet when the doorbell rang.