Hartlip, in Isabel Colegate’s reckoning, may be a peer and an aristocrat but he is not a gentleman. At least he has nothing to do with whatever made that code acceptable and useful. In Hartlip, it has become corrupted, the gentlemanly virtues for so many men of that time have gone and been replaced by show. By 1914, Colegate is saying, ‘being a gentleman’ had more to do with choosing the correct shirt studs than honour, more to do with shooting well than truth. When Gilbert claims Lionel’s bird for his own and disappoints his host by doing so, we begin to understand that the gleaming carapace of these people, with their flawless clothes and manners and codes, is simply to distract us from the emptiness within.

Sir Reuben Hergesheimer is that classic of the time, the Jewish financier, the millionaire from the Levant, whom everyone cultivates and yet everyone is strangely ill at ease with. And Sir Reuben himself has borrowed the dreams of these alien people whom he simultaneously admires and despises:

To Reuben Hergesheimer, English society seemed the best in the world, confident, stable and stupid; in every way open to exploitation by himself.

But, once again, Sir Reuben is not dismissed by Colegate. Far from it. He is modelled on all those Sassoons and Rothschilds and Salmons and Sebag-Montefiores, individuals and families who were so much more literate, so much more learned and genuinely cultured than the society that chose to patronize them. Above all he is based on the great Sir Ernest Cassel, endlessly accommodating to his friend, King Edward (whom in life Cassel so much resembled), famous for allowing the monarch to talk as if – in the tangled world of high finance – they were equals, when nothing could have been further from the truth.

Colegate reminds us that Edwardian, Jewish society somehow resisted the fashion of aristocratic philistinism that blighted their Gentile peers and she praises him for that. But at the last, Hergesheimer too is playing a hollow game, with no goal or purpose beyond a shooting party or a hand at cards, beyond an empty affair or the dreary duty of laughing at Royal jokes. The novelist invites our sympathy for this man, who could have been so much more than he is, as he idly ponders his empty existence and surveys the pretty luncheon table wondering whether or not to adopt his friends’ younger son as his heir and make him rich for life, but she does not stay her verdict on him.

Because the central question that Colegate is asking is a simple one: what is the point of all this? What was it achieving? One of her sharpest examinations is through the marriage of Lord and Lady Lilburn. These two are classic Edwardians, both well bred and well mannered, handsome and rich; their life is not dishonest – as the Hartlips are, to an extent, dishonest – nor is it vicious nor entirely vacuous. Bob Lilburn is, we are told, a good landowner, a fair and easy and even decent man. But for him, as for so many of his kind, the shadow has once again become the substance. The rituals and manners do not embellish his existence. They are the core of it. On the first night, he bursts into his wife’s bedroom raging at the incompetence of his valet’s packing: