There was no way they could ever make love to one another, these two. They were saved from that. They had remained good friends.

And that was how Harriet Osborne came to take possession of Stephen Cox’s apartment. In the small of the night they arranged it, and, both being mad, in the morning they kept their bargain. ‘We mad people should stick to our agreements,’ said Stephen, as Hattie thanked him in the green dawn. And off he flew to Bangkok, and vanished from her sight.

It is not surprising that Hattie looks back on this night with horror. She cannot remember all of it, but she remembers enough to know that she behaved atrociously, even for her. But then, Stephen is a gentleman, and will not tell. And she has got a very low-rent flat out of it. And maybe he is dead and will never be able to tell. Molly Lansdowne is dead, dead of a heart attack in a hotel in Spain. Only Hattie remembers. And she will never tell.

Stephen Cox sits strapped into his Club Class seat at Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for take-off on the Air France flight to Thailand and Vietnam, with his new discreet professionless passport in his pocket. He does not regret handing over his key and his rent book and his last will and testament to Hattie Osborne. One should obey impulses. His impulses had not enabled him to comfort Hattie in the way she most needed, but an empty apartment, however small, was an acceptable offering. He wondered how she would get on with his mysterious and philanthropic landlord, the aptly named Mr Goodfellow. And would she remember to give the bank the note he had scribbled requesting cancellation of the standing order for rent? It did not matter much, one way or the other. The rent was very low, and Mr Goodfellow was too honest to allow himself to be paid twice over.

He had told Hattie he had no idea how long he would be away. He said this to everybody. It was the truth.

He was feeling surprisingly well after his white night. Alert, light in the body, fancy free. The flight from Heathrow to Paris had been on time, and now, on the main leg of his journey eastward, he had happily been allocated a place near the Emergency Exit, with extra leg space, and the seat next to him was still free. He stretched and spread himself and began to browse through the copy of The Times he had purchased in London. Already the British news seemed irrelevant, parochial. Who cared about phone-tapping and Swiss takeover bids for British firms? Who cared if the Queen Mother had attended a ceremony in Nuneaton or the Countess of Snowdon a luncheon in Leith? Who cared that Lady Philippa Carlisle was six years old today, or that Princess Anne had tinted her hair red? Even the long slow diminuendo of the defeated miners’ strike and the rise of the new star Gorbachev failed to interest. Stephen read on, complacently, already half elsewhere, noting in passing that Paul Whitmore, the Horror of Harrow Road, was to appeal against his sentence, and that little Sophal May, an eleven-year-old Cambodian refugee, had been reunited with her parents in New York after a decade of searching.