Hattie is already very drunk. She is high-pitched, fast-talking, feverish. She lets her hair down, in the back of the taxi, telling Stephen about her last lost lover, who had split from her for ever the week before over an incident involving his wife and his eldest daughter and a piano lesson. He is, she tells Stephen, a two-faced, double-crossing, feeble little shit of a liar who wants to have his cake and eat it. She loved him, she tells Stephen, she still loves him, she must be mad. Stephen utters soothing nothingnesses, as they roll past the opulent golden shop fronts of Knightsbridge. He is worried, a little embarrassed. He is used to confidences, for he is the kind of man in whom women choose to confide, but Hattie seems determined tonight to go over the top. He sits back, and decides to let her roll over him. Tomorrow he will have vanished. What does it matter?

The abuse continues, as Stephen, Hattie and Molly settle down to a little picnic of not-quite-defrosted potted shrimps, rubbery smoked chicken, random salad and unripe Camembert, washed down by gin and water. The conversation becomes more and more louche. The setting invites it. Molly’s flat has the air of a crumpled love nest. It is all bijoux and trinkets and tapestry cushions and French furniture. The plates are French china, chipped, pretty, non-matching. The glasses are dusty. Molly no longer sees as well as she did, but is too vain to wear spectacles. She is a handsome woman, with deep sharp blue eyes, and a delicate skin, and soft grey pompadour hair swept back into a coil tied with a blue velvet ribbon. Stephen had always admired her looks, but, as the evening wears on and the tone sinks yet further, he begins to see her as dyed and raddled, farded with the pink and the white and the blue. She is wearing rustling silver. Picture her, in her blue and silver, an English rose, dried and dyed and perfumed. Picture Hattie Osborne, a striking huge-eyed painted forty-year-old with a great headful of snaky falsely frizzed Medusa curls, and a long gold dress with a plunge neckline revealing glimpses of a naked bosom. Picture Stephen Cox, polite in his everlasting white suit. He sits neatly between them like a mascot, like a eunuch, as they tear to pieces the men that they have known. Bedecked and bedizened with jewels, they screech with tongues and talons.

Impotencies, meannesses, cowardices, treacheries, bad manners in and out of bed, all are hymned, bemoaned, indicted. Offences twenty years old are held up to the light, shaken, and savaged. Stephen thinks, this is the kind of dreadful conversation I quite enjoy, but it is going too far. The lipstick, the mascara, the oh so saddening march of merciless age upon them all, there, then, even then, as they sat there eating their salmonella-charged cold platter of treats from the delicatessen. ‘Pour réparer des ans l’irréparable outrage.’ The line from Athalie goes through and through his head. Jezebel, with her borrowed glory. They are all worn and used, they are on their way to the danse macabre, the leper’s ball, the bitter end. Hattie, frenzied, recoils in fear from her mirror image in Molly’s eye, and plunges on recklessly like a mad horse. It is of sex they sing, of the wrongs and pains of sex, and of its disappointments. Mad women, demented women, voracious, demanding, insatiable women.