‘I have to cover my legs with powder, it’s the only way,’ she was now saying, ‘And lie on my back with my feet in the air, and then my maid and I both have to pull as hard as we possibly can for hours and hours.’

Count Rakassyi looked concerned. ‘Can it be worth this agony?’

‘Oh yes, they look wonderful when they’re on. I feel tremendously proud of myself in them. Tommy’s seen them, haven’t you, Tommy? My new hunting boots – yes you have, Tommy, how dare you pretend you haven’t?’

But Sir Reuben was now joining them, making his way across the highly polished floor and the Persian rugs and round the little tables and the potted plants towards the tea table, apologizing for his lateness.

‘It was Hopkins, I know. She can be such a bully,’ said Minnie, turning up the little flame under the silver kettle so that his tea should not be cold.

‘She insisted absolutely that the cure could be effective only if I sat with my feet in this tub for half an hour and not a moment less.’ Sir Reuben raised his shoulders and held out his hands, palms upwards, in a gesture of helplessness which also called to mind, as many of his gestures did, something ancient, Levantine, subtle and insinuating – an echo of a white market-place beneath a thousand-year-old sun. His head was large, his forehead high and domed, his nose of formidable size and boldly hooked, his eyes dark, turned slightly downwards at the outer corners, his mouth delicately shaped and sensitive, his chin firm. After all this his short stature was a surprise: had the nose and chin tended a little more to meet each other, he would have seemed a kind of Asiatic Mr Punch.

He said he had thought again today how perfect the Nettleby coverts were, as good in his opinion as Sandringham or Holkham, though on a smaller scale of course.

‘We copied them,’ said Sir Randolph. ‘Straight copy.’

‘Now that I didn’t realize. How very interesting. How did it happen?’

Sir Reuben leant towards his host, his whole demeanour seeming to express a sympathy so profound as to be on a spiritual rather than a mundane plane. Sir Randolph, recounting the story of his grandfather’s friendship with the first Lord Leicester, who nearly a hundred years ago was already planting his woods with sport in mind, thought again how hard it was to believe this man’s fame as the most pitiless of negotiators in the Rand mining world, and responded again to the sympathetic attention, the quick apprehension and the strange sense of unfathomable melancholy.

‘Ah, Sandringham,’ sighed Minnie. (They had gone on to discuss pheasant-rearing and the methods first used at Sandringham and copied at Nettleby.) ‘We’ve been, of course, but only once. It’s not the same.’

‘How could it be?’ Sir Reuben said, laying a hand on hers.

They sat in silence, smiling reminiscently, the two old favourites, while Sir Randolph forebore to mention what he might have mentioned, the fact that Minnie’s enjoyment of the late King’s approval, and his own consequent efforts to bring his sporting facilities up to the standard expected by his Royal guest, had all but bankrupted the estate.