“Goodness knows,” said Hugo, though in fact he knew quite well what at least one analyst, namely his own, would have thought of it, and startling the suggestions had been, for his analyst had had a lurid imagination full of the strangest imagery and interpretations, a veritable snake pit of entwined possibilities; most of them, it seemed to Hugo, colourful but irrelevant: poisonous snakes, innocent pretty emerald-green snakes, monsters and mermaids, fish-tailed sirens and bright-eyed toads, coiling and swimming in a dark watery hollow. On the whole, the analyst had preferred to see Kate as an archetypal castrating woman, which perhaps, thought Hugo, sitting in the back of his cab on the way back to his silent flat, was fair enough, for a Freudian: she had certainly managed to castrate poor Stuart, who would undoubtedly have dealt with life much better if he had not had the misfortune to marry a woman so set on proving that she could manage single-handed. Fish heads, fish tails. A dangerous woman, rendered harmless by sterility. He thought of her party with pleasant anticipation. She had given some good parties, in the past.

Kate too thought of past parties, as she lay in bed. The dinner party at which she had first met Ted. The party she and Stuart had given to celebrate Mark’s arrival nineteen years ago. The press party at the Dorchester last week to launch a new book on the menopause, at which a fierce woman had cornered Kate and talked at her angrily and intensely for half an hour, advancing inch by inch as she talked, until Kate was in peril of falling backwards over a table covered in bowls of olives, while Kate tried in vain to catch the eyes of various possible rescue forces: she had finally hissed at Kate with unnatural venom, “Well, I mustn’t monopolise you,” and had marched off, as though offended at Kate’s having wasted her time, to leave Kate alone, stranded, far from help. The party three years ago at which her friend Marina had gone into labour prematurely and disconcertingly, and had been carried off in an ambulance, furious at having to miss, as she put it, the fun. The party during which some bloody fool had managed to pull the bathroom washbowl away from the wall, ruining the plumbing and flooding the kitchen below. The summer party during which the famous storm had broken, flooding the whole of North London: they had all gone out and stood in the garden in the torrential hot rain, wet to the skin in seconds, thrilled by the grandeur of the elements, barefoot on the paving stones, rivers of water running through their toes, the dye of their clothes leaking and streaking, their hair plastered to their heads, a drowning party, a Day of Judgement party. Betsy Kay had taken off her shirt and stood there, half naked, streaming like a fountain. Oh, yes, as Hugo said, there was life in it yet, and no end to life’s surprises.