‘To launch this Il Cicerone business, Mailer must have had access to very considerable funds. You can’t do this sort of thing on HP. The cars, the drivers, the food and, above all, the quite phenomenal arrangement that seems to have been made with the Gioconda Restaurant who as a general rule would look upon package diners, on however exalted a scale, as the Caprice would look upon coachloads from the Potteries. It appears that we dine à la carte at the best tables and drink distilled gold if they’ve got it in their cellars. And Mailer pays all. Well, I know we’ve paid him through the nose but that’s another story.

‘And then—this lot. This lot who’ve stumped up fifty quid each for the pleasure of hearing Barnaby Grant, with evident reluctance, read aloud, very badly, from his own best-seller. Next attraction: a walk round an ancient monument that’s open to the public followed by tea or whatever they had on the Palatine Hill, and dinner at the Gioconda which could set them back anything up to £20 a nob if they went under their own steam, and then on to a further entertainment coyly unspecified in the brochure. Probably a very expensive strip and champagne show with possibly a pot party to follow. Or worse.

‘All right. Take Lady B. She’s rolling in money. One of her husbands was an Italian millionaire and she may have alimony paid out to her in Rome. She could obviously afford this show. She’s rich, raffish, pretty bloody awful and all for la dolce vita. No doubt she’s paying for the egregious Kenneth who looks to me very much as if he’s hooked and may therefore turn out to be a useful lead into Mailer’s activities. I gather from something young Sophy Jason, who is an enchanter, let fall that she just suddenly decided to blue fifty quid out of the Italian funds available to her through business connections.

‘The Van der Veghels are a couple of grotesques, and interest me enormously as I think they would you. Grotesques? No, not the right word. We both go for the Etruscan thing, don’t we? Remember? Remember that male head, bearded and crowned with leaves in the Museo Barraco? Remember the smiling mouth, shaped, now I come to think of it, exactly like a bird in flight with the thin moustache repeating and exaggerating the curve of the lips? And the wide open eyes? What an amusing face, we thought, but it is perhaps atrociously cruel? I assure you, a portrait of the Baron Van der Veghel. But against this remember the tender and fulfilled couple of that sarcophagus in the Villa Giulia: the absolute in satisfied love? Recall the protective hand of the man. The extraordinary marital likeness, the suggestion of heaviness in the shoulders, the sense of completion. Portrait, I promise you, of the Van der Veghels. They may be Dutch by birth but blow me down flat if they’re not Etruscan by descent. Or nature. Or something.