I should think he is, said Mrs Standish.

You think he’s what?

Tied up with Alice Delaware.

Knives rattled on a plate.

Gee, he said. You’re out to bitch somebody.

Only a contribution to the conversation, she said.

She couldn’t pay too much attention to that lobster thermidor.

Alice’s swell, said Wally. She’s a New Jersey girl. Went to high school with a pal of mine.

It began to happen across the room, the suggestion of rapprochement, a friction of the senses. Obliquely, Mrs Standish was conscious of Alice Delaware’s salient features, which were difficult to ignore, they were public property. More especially the property of Wally Collins, his eyes, the moist stare that betrayed in Wally a concentration on the physical.

There was music somewhere, the spun caramel of violins, a drawn-out Massenet.

Farther in, Wally had begun to sup his soup. She was trying to get him down. You could feel her laying on the silence. Wally’s bit, they said. But it was sometimes too much, and a man had a right to look around, to pick up an easy smile rather than a sour puss. Sometimes you felt you had stuck around too long, and what was the game anyway, the game you didn’t understand, the words, the meanings. He began to feel free. He mounted under golden grapes on the trellis of a smile. He could have put out his hand and touched a moist, swelling grape.

Afterwards, he lit a cigar, one of the expensive ones he couldn’t quite afford. Benevolence returned with so many shillings’ worth of smoke. You couldn’t throw off what had grown a habit. Or respect, for that matter. You couldn’t help respecting Kate.

Sometimes you take me up, he said.

She had begun to ease back into the safety zone. Out in the lounge she felt the soft give of the ash-trodden carpet, she felt the pressure of his arm.

Yes, she sighed. Sometimes.

She looked nowhere in particular, into a marble wasteland.

I got to leave you. Nature, he explained. Then we’ll go for a bit of a stroll.

Mrs Standish stood in the marble wasteland, waiting not here, not anywhere, she had lost her bearings, was without a map. You will wait here, he said. The easing of tension had left the ticking of an eye. Told to behave in such and such a way, she could still hope, she supposed, for further directions. But she could not move on any intuition of her own in the marble forest, lit with the glittering of foreign smiles, filled with the idioms of foreign voices. A traveller who had chosen to lose her way, she could not regret this, or the last moments of lucidity. She stood in the marble clearing awaiting the pleasure, the condescension of her guide.

Somewhere there was still a music, a terrible jauntiness of violins playing the dances from Henry VIII.