Hattie smiled, and descended from her height, and struggled back into her gold. Stephen helped to zip her up. The smooth skin of her womanly back tingled beneath his fingers. She was charged with electricity. She had a dark mole on her left shoulder. She was still dangerous, but for the moment docile. And off they had all gone, to Marjorie Kinsman’s birthday party, where there had been more drinking, more talking, more excited provocations. He had lost Hattie in the Circean throng of toads and pigs and monkeys and foxes. She had been sucked into the revelry, but he remained conscious of her presence throughout the long evening, catching her voice, her laugh, from beyond the alcove, from the tiny terrace, from the drawing room upstairs. He had made no commitment to depart with her, and she was accustomed to getting herself back from parties, but nevertheless she continued to beam towards him through the chatter and cigarette smoke and smouldering of idle passions, and at about half past one in the morning, as he was thinking he really must leave, as he hovered in the hallway trying to detach himself from Selina Mountjoy and Bruce Gibbon, he heard her cry out from the stairway. She cried out, but not to him. She cried to the world. ‘Oh shit,’ she cried, as she fell forwards, tripping over the hem of her long gold gown, caught by the ready arm of squat little Ivan Warner, always at hand whenever disaster struck. And Stephen had known that he could not leave her there, to be torn to pieces by her enemies, and he had gone to the rescue in his white suit, and for the second time that night she put herself together again, and they had made their farewells together and staggered out on to the cool pavement beneath a racing moon to look for a taxi. She took her shoes off and stood barefoot as they waited. ‘You’d better come back with me,’ said Stephen, who never said such things, as he gave the driver the address of his one-room flat on Primrose Hill. She held on to his hand in the taxi, and rocked and swayed. He made her coffee when they arrived, and she turned suddenly ice sober, and sat there calmly as though a storm had passed. ‘You’re a good friend, Stephen,’ she said. ‘You’re a pal.’ And they had cuddled together in the narrow bed, and whispered of little things. They recalled their first meeting, a hundred years ago, in a dubbing studio off Wardour Street, and a party at the Round House, and the time when Hattie had in her turn rescued Stephen from the clutches of a voracious bejewelled Italian journalist. They spoke of the moment when they had become friends. Hattie, observing Stephen romantically lunching alone in a selfservice Italian restaurant near the British Museum, and struggling incompetently with a plate of spaghetti and some galley proofs, had boldly advanced upon him and his table with her tray, and sat herself down, and offered him a glass of wine from her carafe. He had not resisted. The proofs had snaked all over the floor, and Hattie, rescuing them, had offered her services as personal organizer. They had laughed a lot, over that, and over the years.