“And however much will they eat?” asked Kate. They went once more through the list of drink and food. Simone and Mujid offered to do a couscous, Ruth and Vicky to take care of the salads, and Kate was going to—well, Kate couldn’t quite make up her mind, she dithered from crisis to crisis of indecision: lamb and haricot beans, boeuf bourguignon, quiches, or the Italian caterers round the corner, or a compromise between all these things? Do I enjoy this? Kate asked herself, and her household, writing down lemons, excited by the prospect of so much sheer panic: Kate, whose indecisions inhabited every jar of salad dressing she ever mixed (salad oil or olive oil, garlic or garlic powder, made mustard or powder mustard, cheap vinegar or French vinegar, oh, the possibilities of success and disaster in one jar are endless, and Kate for some reason seemed determined never to decide upon a formula, to improvise each time, to take the risks as they came)—Kate had to admit that she must enjoy uncertainty, for why ever else would one encounter it so often, so willingly? She even quite liked the prospect of being out of work, a sure sign of madness, some might say.

A lot of clearing up had to be done before the party, simply in order to make space to let people into the house. Objects that had lain where they were dumped for months had to be thrown out, taken upstairs, hidden under beds, heaved onto wardrobes, thrown into the cellar. Books, bicycles, bags full of cast-offs intended for jumble sales. The debris of years, ancient homework, long lost, stuffed down chair arms, was redisovered under cushions, with a fine array of ball-points, buttons, needles, scissors, unanswered letters, unposted letters, all offering diversions, temptations to speculation and reminiscence. In the back yard stood a lidless bin full of pre-strike garbage, which Kate and Reuben tried to carry through to the front for the bin men to collect, but found it appallingly heavy, unnaturally heavy: Reuben worked out that this was because it was full of rainwater as well as garbage, and Kate bored a hole in the bottom of the bin with a corkscrew, and out poured the most astonishing thick black liquid, the rotting sediment of ages: down into the drain it went, smelling of the Black Death, as Ruth said, disgusting, putrid, but somehow not unpleasant, oddly satisfactory, to see the fluid ooze away. “Oh, God, what a slut I am,” said Kate, “it’s a wonder we haven’t all got the plague”—but they were all cheerful as they scrubbed and parcelled and incinerated, sneezing in the disturbed dust, blackfingered, heroically cleansing the Augean stables. The cats ran away into the attic in dismay.