“I’ll be in London.”

She followed Mrs. Snelling into an office at the rear of the ground floor, where a middle-aged woman gave her a brochure about the facilities at the Manor and set out the cost, both of the preparatory visit—which, she explained, Mr. Chandler-Powell thought would be helpful to patients but which wasn’t, of course, obligatory—and the greater cost of the operation and a week’s post-operative stay. She had expected the price to be high, but the reality was beyond her estimate. No doubt the figures represented a social rather than a medical advantage. She seemed to remember overhearing a woman say, “Of course, I always go to the Manor,” as if this admitted her to a coterie of privileged patients. She knew she could have the operation under the NHS, but there was a waiting list for non-urgent cases and she needed privacy. Speed and privacy, in all fields, had become an expensive luxury.

She was shown out within half an hour of arriving. There was an hour to spare before she was due at The Ivy. She would walk.

4

The Ivy was too popular a restaurant to ensure anonymity, but social discretion, in all other areas important to her, had never worried her where Robin was concerned. In an age when notoriety required increasingly scandalous indiscretions, even the most desperate gossip page would hardly waste a paragraph on the disclosure that Rhoda Gradwyn, the distinguished journalist, was lunching with a man twenty years younger than herself. She was used to him; he amused her. He opened up for her areas of life which she needed, however vicariously, to experience. And she was sorry for him. It was hardly the basis for intimacy and on her part there was none. He confided; she listened. She supposed that she must be gaining some satisfaction from the relationship or why was she still willing to let him appropriate even a restricted area of her life? When she thought about the friendship, which was seldom, it seemed a habit which imposed no more arduous obligations than an occasional lunch or dinner at her expense, and which it would be more time-consuming and awkward to end than to continue.

He was waiting for her, as always, at his favourite table by the door, which she had booked, and as she entered she was able to observe him for half a minute before he raised his eyes from studying the menu and saw her. She was struck, as she always was, by his beauty. He himself seemed unconscious of it, yet it was difficult to believe that anyone so solipsistic could be unaware of the prize which genes and fate had bestowed on him or fail to take advantage of it. To an extent he had, but seeming hardly to care. She had always found it difficult to believe what experience had taught her, that men and women could be physically beautiful without also possessing some comparable qualities of mind and spirit, that beauty could be wasted on the mundane, the ignorant or the stupid. It was his looks, she suspected, which had helped gain Robin Boyton his place at drama school, his first engagements, his brief appearance in a television serial, which promised much but ended after three episodes. Nothing ever lasted. Even the most indulgent or susceptible producer or director eventually became frustrated at lines not learnt, rehearsals not attended. When the acting failed, he pursued a number of imaginative initiatives, some of which might have succeeded had his enthusiasm lasted for more than six months. She had resisted his blandishments to invest in any of them and he took refusals without resentment. But refusals had never prevented him from trying again.