‘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.

‘The overall effect of the Van der Vs is, however, farcical. There’s always an easy laugh to be won from broken English or, come to that, fractured French. Remember the de Maupassant story about an English girl who became increasingly boring as her command of French improved? The Baroness’s lapses are always, as I’m sure beastly Kenneth would say, good for a giggle.

‘I suppose their presence in the set-up is the least surprising. They’re avid and merciless sightseers and photographers and their fund of enthusiasm is inexhaustible. Whether one can say the same of their fund of cash is anyone’s guess.

‘Major Sweet. Now, why has Major Sweet coughed up fifty quid for this sort of jaunt? On the face of it he’s a caricature, a museum piece: the sort of Indian Army officer who, thirty years ago, was fair game for an easy laugh shouting Qui-hi at a native servant and saying By George, what? I find it unconvincing. He’s bad-tempered, I should imagine pretty hard on the bottle, and amorous. As the young Sophy found to her discomfort in the Mithraic underworld. He’s violently, aggressively and confusingly anti-religious. Religion of any kind. He lumps them all together, turns purple in the face and, deriving his impenetrable argument from the sacraments, pagan or Christian, says the whole lot are based on cannibalism. Why should he pay through the nose to explore two levels of Christianity and a Mithraic basement? Just to have a good jeer?