When she talked, her ear-rings, two pendulous semi-precious stones, swung and hit the sides of her face. You watched them, at least Gerald did, the collision, the rebound off Mrs Mounsey’s cheeks. He contemplated not so much her muddy youth, as her inky middle age in Maida Vale. Outside, definitely outside, in spite of the clever, bitter novels that had let him in for an evening of her company. The intelligentsia. Rootling down the mountainside, making perpetually for some sort of fancy revolution. It was satisfying to know that at least they were always the first to go. Mrs Mounsey’s head separated from her beads.

Mrs Mounsey’s head pursued its vie de sensualiste.

And what about bacon fat? asked Gerald.

Whether Gerald’s behaviour was rudely polite or politely rude was a question that often puzzled those who knew him well.

Bacon fat gives me very little pleasure, said Mrs Mounsey. I can’t stomach the unctuous.

Then she helped herself to sole, her own and half of someone else’s. She hoped it was Someone Else’s. Let her see, let her see, it was. Mrs Mounsey returned with relish to the pleasures of conversation.

It began to go, it began to flower, to open out, it blossomed on a mouth, it branched. There was a fine confusion of wine and words. Gradually out of all this, a purpose formed, or just some vague raison d’être; you creaked no longer as you turned to make a remark, no longer the remarks of shirts, these softened by the warmth of claret. Even the steeliness, the Muriel Raphael, flowed, the little patches of molten steel or quicksilver in the glass of claret.

There was the church, said Muriel Raphael. The one up in the hills. Goudron, was it? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. They had a Velasquez. And a Murillo, one of the melon-faced madonnas.

The voice of Muriel Raphael went directly to the point. She clipped and trimmed her words to the bare skeleton of words, because it was amusing, she had found, she knew the places where to pause, collect her laugh. It was quite as transparent as, well, the volatile mesh of steel that no longer hid, you knew by heart the contour of a molten breast. And you laughed. Because it was expected. Before she allowed herself to go on.

You know, she said. The yellow Spanish melons.

Because she enjoyed, you knew; it was too good to let escape, the Murillo madonna, without further embroidery. Laughing, her mouth opened up. It was wide and thin. It was not, felt Elyot, particularly humorous.

Adelaide would have switched, if she could, by a sign, by some desperately conveyed expression of disapproval, manoeuvred Muriel’s voice on to another track. Herself as a child, gloved, in the smell of prayerbooks, and prick of horsehair through a hassock, felt a twinge for Muriel’s madonna. Muriel Murilla, started Adelaide. And a Jewess. And Juan, half in the defence of General Franco, rising to bite at Muriel’s Murillo.