Dr Marianne Sanderson and Helen Anstey are sharing a taxi. They are distant acquaintances, colleagues of a kind, and their conversation had begun politely enough, but now they are engaged in an impassioned argument about Konstantin Vassiliou. Marianne had said how delighted and astonished she had been to see him walk into the church so unexpectedly, what a relief to see him looking so well after so long an absence: expecting, clearly the usual Konstantin fan-club response. But Helen had snorted with impatient disapproval, and declared that the young man was nothing but a poseur and a parasite and a play-actor. He’d done it all on purpose, according to Helen—the disappearance, the dramatic reappearance, the lot. A spoilt brat, a head-turner, a self-indulgent clown. Marianne, shocked by this character assassination, had sprung to his defence: she had found him a serious person, the soul of kindness, so thoughtful, such a good photographer! Anyone can take a photo, says Helen. Give me a camera, and I can take a photo. There’s nothing to it. But ask him to do your job or mine—why, he’s completely untrained. He’s an amateur. He’s a playboy. He thinks he’s Errol Flynn.

Marianne is so annoyed by this that she thinks of getting out of the taxi and walking, but then thinks better of it, as she does not know the way. So she and Helen sit and glower at the expensive over-heating hardware around them in irritable silence.

‘Anyway,’ says Helen, as the taxi gradually begins to edge forward, groaning and straining: ‘Anyway, Konstantin’s gay.’

‘What?’ says Marianne.

‘Gay. You know. Homosexual.’

‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it,’ says Marianne, ‘I don’t think he is, but even if he is, why shouldn’t he be? Perhaps you’re gay. Perhaps I’m gay. So what?’

Jonathan Headleand also finds himself stuck in the traffic, but he is alone and has nobody to argue with, so he just sits there, listening to his tapes. He has no interest in Stephen Cox or Konstantin Vassiliou, but he is quite curious to see Deirdre Kavanagh again. That is why he is here. After a while he rings Liz’s number on his car phone, but it is engaged. He changes his tape and switches off his engine. Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t get there, after all. Maybe this jam is meant.

Simon Grunewald ditches his taxi and walks. He is good at walking. He has not come halfway round the world to be stopped by this kind of stuff. He has a good sense of direction, and he walks at a steady pace, arriving in St John’s Wood just as Liz is beginning to get worried by the obvious absence of some of her more serious guests—where are the Cox brothers, for example, and what has happened to Alix and Brian? She is trying to detach herself from the attentions of Pett Petrie when Simon arrives: Pett is sticking to the view that somewhere in a safe deposit in Bangkok or Saigon or Hanoi or Phnom Penh lingers the text of the novel to end all novels, the Great Adventure into Nowhere, Stephen Cox’s ultimate masterpiece, and Liz, who has long ceased to believe anything of the sort, is trying to explain that this is not so. She is pleased to see Simon, who explains about the traffic, and hungrily shoves into his mouth a whole large handful of canapes. He eats like a savage, but nobody seems to mind.