There was a lounge where she might sit and wait for him. She crossed the lobby and entered the room and stood, a little breathless, a little dismayed. It would pass, of course, this terror. But until it did she found herself dismayed.

The oppressive little room of gilt cornices and thick carpet and massive leather sofas added to her dismay. There were few spaces in this building where a lady might go, this stuffy little lounge being one of them. The host of dead parliamentarians whose portraits crowded the four walls made it clear that even this small square of government was but grudgingly granted.

When the door behind her opened and closed, she turned to Alasdair with a smile because this fracture in their marriage had not yet appeared, though they had lost the child, though he had moved, by then, into the second bedroom.

But it was not Alasdair. It was George Drummond-Smith.

‘I—Oh!’ she said, confused.

Drummond-Smith, whom she had known, a little, over many years, who had dined on occasion in their home, whose wife one had met perhaps twice in ten years. A man who spoke of trivialities to her and of world events to her husband, which did not mark him out from any other gentleman of her acquaintance, but whose fixed, unwavering gaze when one was speaking or from across a room was unsettling. He was wearing evening dress that night, all the gentlemen were, and gloves, which he now pulled off. A cane, his top hat. He removed that too. He did not seemed surprised to see her, just as though they were meeting by arrangement. He smiled, gave her that fixed look, advanced towards her. He pulled his gloves off—she particularly remembered that—just as though he had some important business to attend to.

‘Eleanor,’ he said, though he had never used her name before nor been asked to. She did not like that, nor the way he said it.

‘Mr Drummond-Smith,’ she replied, meeting his gaze, making a point. ‘I am awaiting my husband.’

‘Indeed? But he is not here, I think.’

It was, she thought, a curious thing to say.

He stood before her very close, too close, and the light was reflected brightly in his eyes, it bounced off his forehead so that his flesh appeared not quite human. His great walrus moustache; he took such pride in it. She imagined him combing it, grooming it. He reached out and took her gloved hand, not taking his eyes from hers. He raised her hand to his lips, at the last moment undoing the little button at her wrist and sliding the glove from her hand, kissing her fingers. She had a sense of something supressed in him, an energy barely contained by his clothes. It radiated out of him. He did not take his eyes from hers.