Not far from their table was a fountain, moved there at some distant time from its original site down in Old Rome. At its centre lolled Neptune: smooth, luxurious and naked, idly fingering the long ringlets of his beard. He was supported by tritons and all kinds of monsters. They spouted, jetted and dribbled into basins that overflowed into each other making curtains of water-drops. The smell of water, earth and plants mingled with cigar-smoke, coffee, cosmetics and fumes of wine.

‘What is all this like?’ Sophy asked Grant. ‘All this magnificence? I’ve never read Ouida, have you? And anyway this is not at all Victorian.’

‘How about Antonioni?’

‘Well—all right. But not La Dolce Vita. I don’t think I get any whiffs of social corruption, really. Do you?’

He didn’t answer and she looked across the table at Alleyn. ‘Do you?’ she asked him.

Alleyn’s glance fell upon Lady Braceley’s arm, lying as if discarded on the table. Emeralds, rubies and diamonds encircled that flaccid member, veins stood out on the back of the hand, her rings had slipped to one side and her talons—does she have false ones, he wondered, and saw that she did—made little dents in the table-cloth.

‘Do you,’ Sophy persisted, ‘sniff the decadent society?’ and then, evidently aware of Lady Braceley and perhaps of Kenneth, she blushed.

Sophy had the kind of complexion Jacobean poets would have praised, a rose-blush that mounted and ebbed very delicately under her skin. Her eyes shone in the candlelight and there was a nimbus round her hair. She was as fresh as a daisy.

‘At the moment,’ Alleyn said, smiling at her, ‘not at all.’

‘Good!’ said Sophy and turned to Grant. ‘Then I needn’t feel apologetic about enjoying myself.’

‘Are you liking it so much? Yes, I see you are. But why should you apologize?’

‘Oh—I don’t know—a streak of puritan, I suppose. My grandpa Jason was a Quaker.’

‘Does he often put in an appearance?’

‘Not all that often but I thought he lurked just now. “Vanity, vanity,” you know, and the bit about has one any right to buy such a sumptuous evening, the world being as it is.’

‘Meaning you should have spent the cash on doing good?’

‘Yes. Or not spent it at all. Grandpapa Jason was also a banker.’

‘Tell him to buzz off. You’ve done a power of good.’

‘I? How? Impossible.’

‘You’ve turned what promised to be a perfectly hellish evening into—‘ Grant stopped short, waited for a moment and then leant towards her.

‘Yes, well, all right,’ Sophy said in a hurry. ‘You needn’t bother about that. Silly conversation.’

‘—into something almost tolerable,’ Grant said.