A boyfriend? She sighs. She has gone out with Molly’s brother, then Toby Pierson, but that has just ended. He wouldn’t commit. Not that she is in a hurry to get married. Half of all marriages end in divorce, like her parents’ and Jomier’s; and isn’t it reasonable to assume that half of the couples who stay married do so out of lethargy or for the sake of the children or because they would rather put up with one another than downsize? ‘In other words, there’s only a one in four chance of being happy.’

‘Wouldn’t you like children?’ asks Jomier.

‘Yes, I suppose so. But what if I’d had a child by Toby that turned out as boring as he is?’ So many of the men she knows are dull. School, gap year, university, a job in the City – blah, blah, blah. They never listen to women. They only want to show off how clever they are to their male friends. They don’t know the difference between being clever and being wise.

‘Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait,’ Jomier says with as wise a smile as he can muster.

‘Oh, vieillesse pouvait all right. My stepmother is twenty years younger than my dad.’

‘Don’t you find that . . .’

‘Unnatural? Not really.’ Then, with a sidelong look into his eyes and the flutter of eyelashes: ‘I don’t think that age matters.’

Jomier catches a look from Mary at the head of the candlelit table. The length and intimacy of his conversation with Annie has been noticed. ‘We’d better turn,’ he whispers to Annie and, with a funny little grimace to express reluctance, she does as she is told. Jomier turns too and talks to the older woman on his right – one of the two he has been invited to look over. She is intelligent, amusing and good-looking but, even as he listens to her describe the mystical beauty of sleeping under the stars in the desert in Oman, he compares her in his mind’s eye with the younger girl behind him.

Oman. ‘It was all arranged by Jamie Scott. He was at Sandhurst with the Sultan.’ Sandhurst with the Sultan. Jomier feels like an extra in a 1930s film with raddled ladies talking in clipped upper-class voices about their friends who were friends with sultans and maharajas and the Prince of Wales. Where had Adrian found her? Central casting? Or was she a friend of Mary’s – a lame duck who comes with the trousseau when you marry the granddaughter of an earl? She talks on. He listens, talks when prompted, and listens again. Finally it is time for the ladies to withdraw while the gentlemen gather round their host to drink port and smoke cigars. Another old-fashioned upper-class custom revived by Adrian to go with the Purdeys and plus fours.

Chapter 13

Chapter 13