Kate first met Ted at one of his own dinner parties. She and Evelyn were by this time good friends, sharing a woman’s world, as we have seen, of small children and excursions to the park. Such intimacies are often fleeting, born of necessity, but Kate and Evelyn liked one another very much, and had become used to sharing their pleasures and their complaints. Kate at this period had fewer anxieties than Evelyn, for her children weren’t much trouble either in school or out of it; paradoxically, Kate would suppose, because they didn’t have a proper father as Evelyn’s did. Stuart, whom Kate had by this stage learned to treat with wary and patronizing affection, was a much less disturbing influence than Ted appeared to be—a nice man, gentle, tender, warm-hearted. She and Evelyn would talk of these matters. Kate conjured up in her mind a picture of ogre Ted, the masculine man, the patriarchal bully—not that Evelyn was exceptionally disloyal, but she couldn’t help letting her irritation show, and had no inhibitions about analysing them in the calm, objective, intellectual way in which she also spoke of housing problems and immigration, in which she had once with her friends at boarding school discussed South Africa and Stalin and Suez. So when Evelyn invited Kate to dinner to meet Ted, as in the natural course of events (or at least in the natural course of events in a life such as Evelyn’s) she did. Kate set off with considerable curiosity to meet this shadowy monster—her imagination also fired, it must be admitted, by accounts of the offstage drama of the suicidal and passionate actress. Men were awful, she and Evelyn agreed, but at the age of twenty-nine Kate had not ceased to find them interesting.

Evelyn invited Kate partly because she was worried about her principal guests, a potentially difficult couple, friends of Ted’s, the husband a Swedish birth-control expert who worked for the World Health Organisation, and his English wife, an unknown quantity. Kate, it seemed to Evelyn, would be useful, for she had a lively professional curiosity about almost everything, and a journalist’s knack of asking questions when the going got sticky, and then managing to look genuinely interested in the answers.

The other guest was Evelyn’s cousin Hugo.