‘I know.’ He had moved to the door and Bruna joined him, to show him out.

‘Do you know anything at all about Napoleon?’

‘Waterloo.’

‘Excellent. You’ll know a great deal more by the time you’ve had your night-cap. It’s Archie’s passion. Or does one say, “He is Archie’s passion”? In any case you’ll be trapped, I fear.’

‘Archie?’

‘Ah yes. Most people call him Charles. I call him Archie.’

Bruna opened the door with a discreet rattle of the handle, and went on to the gallery.

‘You’d better go. You’re being thrown out.’ She raised a fragile hand towards him, the bracelets clicking and winking on her slender wrist. ‘And thank you. Not for the sea-part. Not for that at all. But for the … conspiracy. You follow me?’

‘I do.’

‘Splendid fellow.’ She lowered the hand and lay deeply into the pillows. ‘Too idiotic, wasn’t it? At my age. To go shrimping. Without a net?’

‘Wasn’t it though? Good night.’

She nodded, silently dismissing him, her eyes closing in tiredness.

He went out on to the gallery alone. Bruna shut the door behind him. For a moment he stood looking along the empty length. In the high-vaulted ceiling a Venetian-glass chandelier cast soft light through a myriad of coloured flowers. He leant over the marble rail; below, the black and white tiled floor of the hall, an immense glass table, a giant fern in a fat Tuscan pot; Archie standing at one side, half in the shadows, a bottle of wine and a corkscrew in his hands. He raised them.

‘Wine? Do you prefer to stay with your wine? Or a whisky? Perhaps a brandy? Whatever you like … I have everything in the study. Except wine, that is.’

He was smiling anxiously, curiously, in the filtered light from the glass flowers.

‘I’d like a Scotch, if that’s all right?’

‘Splendid. I never take wine after my meal … but some people do, you see. Scotch it shall be. Coming down?’