‘If I had been married to a successful man,’ said Lili, ‘I should never have discovered myself, or my potential.’

‘You’ve always been the same, Lili,’ said Robert. He was right, for I remembered her and she hadn’t changed.

The gallery owner sighed when he saw us. Only I saw him sigh, for Lili and Robert were looking not at him but at the walls, and he found me too negligible to bother to disguise his ennui.

‘Robert, Lili,’ he said and didn’t inquire as to my identity.

‘This is Margaret,’ said Lili abstractedly. ‘I don’t know why you were worried about the lighting, Robert.’

‘It glares off the surface,’ said Robert.

‘No it doesn’t,’ said Lili. ‘Not if you stand here.’

‘Everyone won’t be able to stand there,’ said Robert. ‘Not if you’re standing there.’

‘I have booked a table for midday,’ said the gallery owner, ‘and I have an appointment at two.’

As we walked to the restaurant I felt miserable, foreseeing argument and dissent and wishing that I possessed the charm and the experienced polish to ease the tension between these people.

Lili said suddenly, ‘What I like best in the world is to see men dancing.’

Robert said, ‘I was telling Lili in the car that she shouldn’t have stopped being a dancer.’

‘I don’t mean ballet,’ said Lili. ‘I gave up ballet because I found the artifice irksome. It isn’t natural to dance on one’s toes. People can’t fly, they can only jump, and once you’ve realized that you must either laugh or cry. I like to see men stamping all of their foot on the ground—Morris dancers and Russians and Greeks and jumping, like people who are resigned to mere jumping, without any pretence at flight. I don’t think I like to see women dancing at all—when they’re not hopping they’re undulating.’

‘Don’t you enjoy the ballet?’ asked the gallery owner, who, I think, had not been listening.

‘No,’said Lili with emphatic patience. ‘I dislike the artifice, you see.’

‘You must suspend disbelief,’ advised the gallery owner, bored.

‘I don’t see why I should,’ said Lili, argumentative.

She stopped walking suddenly, so that the two people behind nearly collided with her. We also stopped after a few paces and turned to look back at her. She seemed poised to make a speech, then and there, in the middle of Tottenham Court Road, but all she said, before she came forward to join us, was: ‘Art can be a snare and a delusion.’

‘If it wasn’t for art,’ said Robert, ‘we wouldn’t be about to eat.’

We had reached the restaurant, and the gallery owner held the door open for us as we went in. It was called El Misr and Lili exclaimed, ‘Egypt again. Egypt is surely the motif of the year.’

‘I thought it would make you feel at home,’ said the gallery owner—untruthfully, I felt. I suspected that the restaurant was cheap and that this was the reason we had been guided here. Also I could hear irony in his tone and I thought that for some reason he was very annoyed indeed.