Hardly have I sunk my chilled limbs into the water than the phone rings. I am inclined to ignore it, but there is an extension on the wall above the bath and it is no great effort to stretch out a frothy arm.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ crackles Alfred, my chauffeur, ‘I have brought the lady you invited to dinner.’

Damn and drat. It’s the scrawny Stemp woman. She will want to talk about her precious Peter all night, when I have bigger things on my mind. Still, she is unlikely to stay late with the lad all on his own at home, and I suppose I owe the pair of them a small favour for leading me to the end of my trail.

‘Show her to the bar, Alfred, and order her a glass of best champagne. Tell her I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.’

Dinner with Mrs Stemp – ‘you must call me Eleanor’ – is not half as dreary as I feared. Detached from her pimply offspring and dressed in a stiff dark suit with a white silk blouse, Eleanor Stemp can hold her own in an intelligent conversation and tell a good yarn against herself. Over singed salmon Hollandaise and a slightly-too-tart Pouilly-Fuissé, she tells how she rushed into marriage with an irreproachably ‘suitable’ man to get away from a drug-riddled rock guitarist whom she loved to distraction. Her suitable husband left her cold in every way and she was by no means upset, one evening when she came home, to find him gone, leaving a letter beside the hall telephone telling her that he wanted to marry Helen, a schoolgirl waitress at Happy Burgers. Peter was, by this time, displaying exceptional musical aptitude and practising his child’s fiddle more than an hour each day. She decided to help the lad make the best of his gift. She lacks social life and job satisfaction, but she enjoys watching Peter’s progress and she finds flight for her fantasies in a surprisingly elevated taste for contemporary European literature.

Over crème caramels that might well have been made from leftover Hollandaise, we discuss Jorge Semprun, Patrick Süsskind, Thomas Bernhard, and Ivan Klima. She has just discovered Czeslaw Milosz. I mention my distant visit to Poland and she demands to know more, more, her eyes sparking with static energy. I praise the Warsaw Yiddish novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer, scanning her face for prejudice. But much as she might loathe the frummers of Oldbridge, Mrs Stemp’s racial hatred stops at the books on her bedside table. As coffee is sullenly poured, she looks at her watch and exclaims, ‘Is it ten o’clock? I must be going. Peter will be beside himself.’

‘We haven’t begun to discuss his future,’ I gently remind her.

‘Oh dear,’ she groans, turning fretful and mousy.