They would have walked through the Tennysons’ door, his arm at her back, suspended two inches above her shawl, and they would have greeted Rita, a tall woman with a long neck and sharp elbows, who was telling the Colombian Defense Attaché, a man with crumbs on his face, “It’s life, isn’t it, and life is people and if you don’t invest in people . . . ”, and Rita, catching sight of Penny would have said, “Remember Tino?” who had grasped the opportunity to vanish in pursuit of a tray, and Penny would say, “Yes, he’s frightfully nice,” and Rita would say, “Thomas would like him,” and stick a piece of paper on their backs with the name of someone famous whom they had to guess by asking ten questions, yes or no answers, no cheating, mind, and why don’t you start with Denver, he still doesn’t know who he is, no, really he doesn’t, and dutifully they would make their way over to Denver, to find a placard on his back with the words KING KONG, and Denver who was a little hard of hearing so one was obliged to repeat oneself would smile fixedly and ask, “Am I alive?” and tell Wavery that Rita always had such nice friends and this was their very good friend Mr Riding who’d just come from London on business and Wavery would politely have enquired of the good-looking, florid-faced man with CLARK GABLE on his back how long he had been in the wine trade, and the waitress whose shoulders Mr Riding was squeezing would pause long enough for Penny to remove a tomato juice and Wavery would take a gin and tonic and two long swallows and Will you excuse me? cross the room to greet his Ambassador, a man with a whim of steel who had published a monograph on the whiskered tern and kept black-necked geese in the residence garden, and they would talk about the latest bomb in a spiritless way, the Ambassador blinking because he believed himself to be a security risk, and too distracted to ask Wavery a yes, no question, he would say he must go and speak with Denver who had a fairly good ear to the ground, and turning reveal himself as RONALD BIGGS which was perhaps not a clever move on Rita’s part, and Wavery feeling very dull would move towards the buffet table where presently Penny would join him escorted by a Peruvian artist, a dirty word in the art world, having overcleaned the treasures of Lima’s National Gallery, who was giving her some painterly advice he’d picked up from a most terrible woman, his mother, and Penny would tell him in her most earnest voice, “I believe people who hate their mothers often get on very well in life,” and did he know her husband, they were chalk and cheese, which is so much better – if you have things in common, you only fight over them, to which the artist would reply holding Wavery’s hand for several seconds longer than necessary, “I have heard proof he is of our species,” and very shortly afterwards, to escape the German Cultural Attaché, a narcolept who fell asleep in mid-sentence, to escape the wife of the French Number Two, an attender of poetry readings, “I’m coming to talk to you when I’ve done my stint with Denver!”, to escape the cigarette smoke and, the fly-plague of questions, am I dead? am I alive? am I a movie-star? a politician? no seriously, Jesus Christ?, to escape for a moment this party and its brutal similarity to every other party he attended, Wavery would have walked out of the throbbing light and breathed a sigh of unrestrained relief because Rita’s patio was empty, not a soul, just a chair for him to sit and count the shooting-stars, because fifteen minutes before Catharine Riding would have left the room for her hotel in Miraflores, and Wavery’s destiny would not have shifted forever.