‘Any dancing?’

‘Doubt it.’

‘What will they talk about?’

‘Clive’s friends are all Ministry bods so there’ll be War Office gossip, I suppose. And there’s bound to be some bookish types …’

‘So if you forced me to summarize it, absolutely forced me – because, to be frank, asking a writer to précis his work is an act of utter barbarism. Just imagine demanding that Picasso scribble a little sketch of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon for you – but if, as I say, you absolutely forced me to reduce it to a single line, I’d have to suggest that it’s about the impossibility of true communication between the sexes,’ said the man with a paisley neck-tie, checking over Winnie’s shoulder for the fortieth time in case someone more important or better-looking was standing behind her. ‘I’m thinking of calling it “Thus Endymion Weeps”. What do you think of that for a title? Intriguing, n’est-ce pas?’

‘Yes,’ said Winnie, not even attempting enthusiasm, her facial muscles already fatigued by the expression of interest she’d been feigning for the last ten minutes. As far as she could gather, he hadn’t even written the book yet; it was just a clanking bucket of ideas he’d filched along the way, like poor old Jim with his looted rubbish.

There was a tiny pause in the conversation, the sort of pause which might prompt someone not entirely self-absorbed to ask a question of the other person. ‘Of course, it’s not my only idea,’ he continued. ‘My agent was insistent that I should – oh, there he is. I say, Ivan!’

Winnie turned to see an elderly man with a large red face, and an extraordinary arrangement of long white hair, like a swirl of mock cream. ‘Oh, hello, Maxwell,’ he said, with a certain lack of keenness.

‘Join us?’

‘Yes. Of course.’ Ivan glanced around in the obvious hope of finding someone else to talk to, before resignedly moving towards his client.

Maxwell resumed his monologue. ‘I was just saying to … to …’ He gestured vaguely at Winnie. ‘That you advised me very strongly to pursue the idea of fictionally examining what I would term – in a self-coined phrase, I believe – osmotic emotion …’

Released from the post of solitary listener, Winnie edged backward a few inches, and then slowly revolved through forty-five degrees so that she was on the very fringes of – and yet not actually involved in – a different conversation (‘… at which point I said to him, “Oh, I hadn’t realized that you want the sort of poetry that can be sung to the tune of ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’,” and he looked at me daggers’); the speaker’s eyes slid over her without interest, and she was at last free to simply look around. The room was blue with cigarette smoke and completely full, and she knew no one besides her sister – twinkling somewhere at the centre of the crush – and her brother-in-law, Clive, who had greeted her briefly before being summoned away to a telephone call.