On Liz Headleand’s best spare bed, Hattie Osborne lies flat on her back and wiggles her toes as she stares at the plaster rose in the centre of the ceiling, as she holds both protective hands palm down upon the mound of her unborn baby and wonders not for the first time whether it would be bad form to call it Stephen or Stephanie. She is calmly nervous. What if it all goes wrong, what if she dies under the knife, what if there is great pain? What if Aaron abandons her? She sighs, and shuts her eyes for a moment. It does not matter if he does. If she survives this adventure, she will never be alone again. She has married into the Headleands. Aaron may desert her, but Liz and Charles and Marcia never will. She has a family. They will not disown her now.

In the garden, Gabriel Denham is cross-questioning Charles Headleand about Global International’s prospects in Hong Kong, and Liz is restoring to the finger of Marianne Sanderson the Pailin ruby she had failed to deliver to Dr Chhi Beng Sam.

Esther and Alix, reunited by a bed of nicotine flowers, discover that they have not met since their mini-holiday in Italy more than a year ago: they speak of Alix’s researches and the Queen of Novara. Cathy Upwood, plucking destructively at a climbing hydrangea, talks to a raffish old bird in a felt hat who says she is called Marjorie, and who claims that Stephen Cox spent his last night in London at her seventieth birthday party. Cathy thinks Marjorie is making it all up, but why not? Cathy is a terrible liar herself, she well understands liars. In the dining room, Simon Grunewald is entertaining a wide-eyed Hilda Stark with traveller’s tales about the burial rituals in Irian Jaya and the efforts of Catholic missionaries to prevent the villagers from surrounding themselves with stinking platforms covered with decaying corpses, and Robert Oxenholme is talking about cricket to Oliver, the West Indian lover of Liz’s halfsister and his own distant cousin Marcia Campbell. When they meet, Robert and Oliver always talk about cricket, a subject about which both are knowledgeable, though they suspect that there is another, more interesting topic that they might chance on one day if they pursue the metaphor faithfully enough, if they get to the end of their views of Wes Hall, Malcolm Marshall and intimidatory bowling.