‘What happened?’ I asked at length.

‘Oh, nothing to concern you.’

‘How did you guess he was here?’

‘His brother called me and asked me where he’d got to. Lord Soulford had his account frozen, so he couldn’t go to a hotel. Jeremy told me he left with the change in his pocket and whatever he could shove in his bag. I must say, James, I’m a little surprised you didn’t call me. Surprised and shocked.’

Jessica was in magisterial mode. She was neither surprised nor shocked, and I resented the imposition of unwarranted guilt. I actually thought she might be a little jealous. Clearly she was too cosy with the family Manley to provide the disinterested support that Francis had felt he needed. I was also hurt that his choice of my house had been, at least in part, one of financial necessity.

‘He asked me specifically not to tell you,’ I said. I was on the point of adding that I could see why when there was a noise on the stairs. Francis came back in with his bag packed, but when Jessica rose from her seat he dropped it in the frayed lap of an armchair and went over to the drinks cabinet. There was nothing in his manner to suggest any conflict or concern. In fact, he seemed quite cheerful.

‘Would you like a drink? James, can I make you something?’

‘We don’t have time for a drink, Francis,’ Jessica said carefully. ‘Why don’t we have one later, back at my place.’

‘If you don’t want to drink I can make a virgin.’

‘I don’t think anyone else wants one.’

‘I’d like an aperitif,’ he said.

‘We’re not staying for lunch.’

‘We have enough food for everyone. It would be no trouble,’ I said. I was still angry with Jessica. She ignored me, which was the best retort available.

‘Francis, we have to get going.’

He turned around to look at her. Behind him, the drinks cabinet had its replica-walnut doors thrown open in welcome, its crystal contents tinkling lightly with the tread of my father in the upstairs bedroom. They looked at one another, and I was once again acutely aware of the understanding between the two of them that was like pig-Latin between children: a code of exclusion, a means of communicating the forbidden. He turned back to the cabinet and gently shut the doors, dipping his head for a moment and collecting himself before he came away.

‘Yes, we do. James, it was wonderful of you to have me, I’m only sorry it turned out to be such a brief stay. Will you please communicate my thanks to your papa. I shall write him a letter, of course, but I think for the moment explanations are best kept to a minimum.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, James,’ Jessica said, her face a deliberate blank. ‘I guess I’ll see you in a fortnight, if not before.’

I explained to my dad that Lord Soulford had telephoned Francis and applied the balm of Christmas cheer. I knew the restoration of sympathy between father and son would appeal to his sense of right. Fortunately we had not yet contacted my aunt. I treated this brief interlude as a dramatic appetizer, a kind of masque before the main show. It did not occur to me to wonder what had happened after the players had left my little set, or to ask what had driven Francis away from his home, or if it did it was only in the easy terms of melodrama, of beautiful vases thrown across drawing rooms and the spinning of tyres on a gravelled drive. I thought only of how much I was looking forward to my return to Cambridge, where events seemed to be important, where the friends I had obtained gave my life weight and substance. After Francis’s departure from my house, the whole of Christmas was to me a favour undertaken on my family’s behalf, and it was all I could do to conceal from them my impatience.