The Haughs’ house, All Saints, was well adapted for this sort of treatment. It was a nineteenth-century neo-Gothic church, which Haugh and his wife had converted and decorated themselves. They cooked on a skilfully restored early Victorian range in the vestry, slept in witty antique sailors’ hammocks in the north clerestory, and ate at the altar. They had hedged off the transepts with room-dividers and rubber plants to form from the north transept a play area and from the south a sun-loggia, though the brute glare of the noonday sun was somewhat softened by the time it had filtered through St. Arthur, St. Giles, St. Buryan, and St. Maud. The crypt was rented as a bed-sitter, and the whole of the nave left as an open-plan living-room. Running hot and cold water had been installed in the font.

The effect was heightened by the amusing objects with which the house was decorated – an old windlass, a Wimshurst machine, a bishop’s cope, enamelled Victorian advertisements for stove-blacking and lucifers, a collection of Edwardian false teeth. Like the homeless layabouts and the many-splendoured cosmogonies, the cream of the world’s junk-shops sought out Haugh’s fabled hospitality. The stuff stayed long enough to get its breath back on the way down to limbo, and was then pushed out in favour of even more outrageous trouvailles.

One evening when a party seemed to be developing, Haugh was surprised and pleased to find that among the guests was almost the whole staff of the William Morris Institute. Conceivably someone had sent invitations out. Anyway, the occasion was a great success. Everyone gasped at the sight of All Saints, since they had not themselves managed to convert into houses anything more unsuitable than artisans’ cottages, stables, or Salvation Army hostels. The font was turned into a punchbowl for the occasion, and the nave was soon completely filled with noise, as everyone spoke louder and louder to compete with the echo of the conversation booming vacantly back from the roof, until in most parts of the room hardly anyone could hear anything that anyone else was saying, which created the essential party feeling that wit and truth abounded on every hand, if only one could have heard them.

Plushkov hovered around Haugh, flattering him as best she could.

‘One does think you’ve been terribly clever in converting this place,’ she mouthed inaudibly.

‘I know,’ said Haugh, on the assumption that she had just put forward some new political or sociological theory.

‘You!’ cried Plushkov, whose well-modulated feminine voice was incapable of rising above a certain discreet level of output. ‘Clever!’

‘I know. He is, tremendously,’ said Haugh admiringly, greatly impressed by Ewe’s work already.

Chiddingfold and his wife arrived and came among their subjects. They stood like two immense ice-puddings, towering, massive, immobile, freezing everything within range. Chiddingfold seemed to be trying to shrink into himself, as if to deprecate the vastness of his authority and to become as other men for the evening. From somewhere inside that great fortress a small man looked out, smiling as best a prisoner might, amazingly conversational for a man who has spent so long in solitary confinement. ‘Hallo,’ he said to anyone who came near enough, and smiled shyly.