“No.”

He grinned, as if he had expected nothing better. “Good old Belle …” Then, before she could do anything, his arm came out and he pushed the door back, and suddenly he was over the threshold. “Change your mind,” he said, his eyes sharp. “I was at the meeting tonight. I want to talk to you.”

She followed him into the sitting-room, feeling weak and unarmed. There was something in his manner she could not place, notwithstanding all the copious experience of the past.

“Snug little place you’ve got here,” he said, looking round him. His eyes wandered to the side table and the silver tray. “Mind if I help myself?”

She saw, with misgiving, that his suit, though well-pressed, was frayed, and the heels of his shabby shoes worn far down. She shrugged.

“Have a drink if you like. You’ll get nothing else from me.”

Above the splash of the soda siphon she heard his voice.

“I was at the meeting,” he repeated, as if this explained everything. “Very good show. And that girl’s a stunner. You must have taken a dollar or two. Not for the first time, either.”

“What’s that to you?”

Now he was facing her. “I’m interested in the way people make money, that’s all.” When she did not answer, he said: “You’ve got to help me, Belle. Things haven’t been going too well.”

Things haven’t been going too well … Captain Charles Bannister, the nearly-titled Englishman (second cousin of an earl) whom she had married twenty years before had been Mrs Bannister’s first and last excursion into matrimony. ‘Things haven’t been going too well’ might have been the postlude of their wedding march: now it brought back vividly the small and large dishonesties of their joint past. Charles Bannister, born a few years before the turn of the century, had been just old enough to take part in the First World War. Demobilized in 1919, he had kept his wartime rank (he had explained, once, the somewhat complicated reasoning by which he considered himself entitled to call himself Captain, although not a regular soldier); and it was as Captain Charles Bannister, a well-connected soldier with a slight limp, honourably discharged and now selling stocks and bonds on half-commission in New York, that she had met him, back in 1929.

Though a self-reliant young woman of twenty-five, she was not equipped to withstand so talented an operator as this. They were married within three months of that first meeting.

She realized soon enough where her own inadequacy had led her; nor did it take her long to work out that 1929 was an exceptionally good year for a bond salesman, however well-connected, to marry a rich woman who still remained rich after the market crash. By then, of course, it was too late: the era of ‘Things haven’t been going too well’ had already been ushered in, accompanied by a dismal fanfare from his bank manager.

At the time of their marriage. Charles Bannister was deeply in debt: she was deeply in love; at first, the two things cancelled out, to their mutual satisfaction. But that could not last long, since his rescue seemed to be a continuous process, and her love was not. She found that it was not enough to redeem him from pawn when they were married – there was never a moment, subsequently, when he was completely solvent, either in money or in honour.