If Sophy had asked ‘what’ or indeed had shown any kind of curiosity Grant would probably have fobbed her off with a vague sentence or two but she said nothing. She looked at Rome and sipped her drink.

‘You have the gift of Virgilia, Sophy.’

‘What was that?’

‘A gracious silence.’

She didn’t answer and suddenly he was telling her about the morning of the thunderstorm in the Piazza Colonna and the loss of his manuscript. She listened with horror, her fingers at her lips. ‘Simon,’ she muttered. ‘You lost Simon!’ And then: ‘Well—but obviously you got it back.’

‘After three days’ sweltering hell spent largely on this roof-garden. Yes. I got it back.’ He turned away and sat in one of the little wrought-iron chairs. ‘At this table, actually,’ he said indistinctly.

‘I wonder you can face it again.’

‘You don’t ask how I got it back.’

‘Well—how, then?’

‘Mailer—brought it here.’

‘Mailer? Did you say Mailer? Sebastian Mailer?’

‘That’s right. Come and sit here. Please.’

She took the other chair at his table, as if, she thought, the waiter was going to bring their breakfast. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘You’re worried about something. Do you want to talk about it?’

‘I suppose I must. To this extent, at least. Do you believe me when I tell you that at the moment I can almost wish he had never recovered the thing?’

Sophy said, after a pause, ‘If you say so, I believe you, but it’s a monstrous idea. For you to wish Mailer hadn’t found it—yes. That I can imagine.’

‘And this is what I meant. You’re too young to remember when my first book came out. You were a child, of course.’

‘Aquarius? Well, I was about fourteen, I think. I read it with goggling eyes and bated breath.’

‘But afterwards. When you came into Koster Press? You heard about—the scandal? Well, didn’t you? You can’t tell me they don’t still thumb it over in those august premises.’

‘Yes,’ Sophy said. ‘I heard about the coincidence bit.’

‘The “coincidence” bit! Did you, by God! And did you believe that I could have repeated in exact detail the central theme of a book I’d never read?’

‘Certainly. That’s the general opinion at Koster’s.’

‘It wasn’t the opinion of twelve good, bloody men and true.’

‘Token damages, though, weren’t they? And there’s a long list of proven literary coincidences. I write children’s books. I found last year that I’d lifted the entire story-line of Mrs Molesworth’s Cuckoo Clock. Actually it wasn’t coincidence. My grandmother had read her copy aloud to me when I was six. I suppose it was stowed away in my subconscious and bobbed up unbeknownst. But I swear I didn’t know.’

‘What did you do when you found out?’

‘Scrapped it. I was just in time.’

‘You were lucky.’