It had not always been so. He had been a frequent visitor to their house once, the Solicitor-General. Former Solicitor-General now. His wife, Adaline, a close acquaintance with whom Eleanor had sat on a number of committees, was soon to be his former wife. Their case had been reported in the most graphic detail in that morning’s Divorce Court column. Eleanor had read it in her room after Alasdair had gone out: Jellicoe v. Jellicoe. Mr Tancredi appeared for the petitioner, Adaline Florence Jellicoe, who applied for a divorce from her husband, Leon Peter Jellicoe, on the grounds of his adultery with one Dora Hyatt. It had turned her a little cold and she had thrust the paper aside. Leon Jellicoe’s adultery laid bare to the world, his political career over—he had been spoken of as a future premier—and his wife’s very public humiliation complete. Now their beautiful Potts Point home was on the market and Adaline Jellicoe was to sail for England. Or so Eleanor had heard, for she had not called on her former friend for many weeks. Probably no one had. Dora Hyatt, one understood, had been the housekeeper.

But it was no business of hers.

Eleanor looked about her for a friendly face. A footman slid past proffering jellied quinces and quails and plover eggs which the members plucked from his tray and popped into their mouths, one after another after another so that whole flocks of quails disappeared and whole generations of plovers were decimated, or so it seemed to Eleanor.

She could not see Alasdair. He was, of course, but one black-coated gentleman in a room full of black-coated gentlemen and so difficult to spot. Indeed, aside from the few ladies dressed, like herself, in white and dove grey and pearl and ivory, the only relief from the unrelenting black were the liveried footmen who darted about like exotic reef fish in a pond full of ageing somnambulant trouts. But still she could not see him.