His wife was dressed already in a lustrous blue silk gown, diamonds at ears, throat and wrist. Her colour was high and her eyes shone, two points of light as bright as the yellow eyes of the bats that circled above, of the old possum that lived in the fig tree outside. There was a bright, almost brittle quality about her; it had been there these last three days and Alasdair was glad, now, that he had accepted the invitation from Booker-Reid. To sit opposite his wife at their own dinner table with her profuse gushing was a prospect suddenly untenable.

The servant, for whatever reason, was not in attendance, and so he removed his own hat and coat and gloves.

‘The meeting went badly and then descended into a pitched battle,’ he said in answer to his wife’s enquiry.

He did not, as a rule, report the outcomes of his meetings to her, for it seemed to him she rarely showed an interest, but this evening he wished to shock her from her complacency. Was it complacency? It seemed more like a sort of hectic agitation, the cause of which he could not guess.

‘Heavens!’ she exclaimed. And she searched his face as though to see whether he was in earnest or in jest. ‘Was anyone hurt?’

‘I certainly hope so,’ he replied. ‘At any rate, I hope so of the dunderheads who peddle their nonsense and whip the common masses into a frenzy of such irrational fear they can no longer tell their heads from their feet.’

‘There were people who disagreed with you, then?’ said Eleanor.

‘It is hardly a question of agreeing or not agreeing, Eleanor. Naturally a man is free to disagree, but when his head has been filled with so much nonsense he cannot make a rational decision …’ He gave up. She did not understand, could not be expected to.

She had gone ahead into the drawing room. The fire was lit and she stood before it, smiling. ‘Come inside, Alasdair,’ she said.

But he could not look at her, he could not come into the drawing room. ‘I must dress for dinner,’ he replied briefly. He went up to his dressing room and closed the door.

And after a time he did dress, slowly and meticulously, taking some little while to knot a new tie and at last pausing and staring at himself in the mirror. He could not find one of his tiepins, a gold one engraved with his initials. He searched, turning first one drawer inside out and then another. At last he flung open the door and called, ‘Alice!’

It occurred to him the maid had taken it. She had never taken anything before, to his knowledge, but it was simply a matter of time. They all stole eventually.