Wilson sounded grim, and I began to say something vaguely encouraging, realised that pretty much any statement I produced would sound patronising, and turned instead to the man whose face tweaked my memory. “Mr Koehler, isn’t it? I believe we’ve met somewhere, although I can’t at the moment remember when it was.”

He turned rather pale and gazed into his tea cup as if it might suddenly hold a shot of something harder. “Oh no, no, I don’t think so. I’d have remembered meeting you.”

I searched his features for clues, but couldn’t retrieve anything more than the vague sense of having seen him in person, across some busy and crowded room. A train station, perhaps? It would come to me, I thought, then went back to the first woman. “I don’t believe we’ve met before,” I told her, “but your name is familiar.”

She laughed. “Not surprising. Lyn and I were all over the headlines a year or so back.”

“The newspapers, yes. Something about the Archbishop of Canterbury, wasn’t it?”

“He eventually became involved, yes.”

The other woman, Lyn, took pity on me. “Faith and I tried to marry. We registered with our parish church, banns were posted, and it wasn’t until we showed up on the day that the priest figured out that Lyn wasn’t a man.”

“If you’d been wearing the morning suit I got you, we’d have managed it,” Faith said with a rueful shake of the head, which launched them on a story in two voices, a narrative of ecclesiastical derring-do and upper-class humour. It sounded like an oft-told tale, but none the less amusing for its worn edges, and I remembered some of the details as she went along. The two were artists, of a sort—one a sculptor of huge ugly bronze masses, the other the creator of bizarre canvases thick with objets trouvés. I thought they had moved to Paris, after which they had not been heard of again.

By common consent, our conversation skirted the topic of politics. Reddy, it turned out, was a playwright who had produced two critically acclaimed plays, the second of which had spent some months on Broadway in New York, before being hired to come here and produce something for the maharaja. He had been here for two years, with nothing to show for it but a lot of paper and a fading presence on Broadway. I didn’t find out who Taran Singh was, aside from being an opponent of Jinnah’s Moslem League, before the sporting contingent arrived, fresh from their horses and smelling of sweat and gunpowder.