We did not go to Mayo. I cannot remember what excuse I made to my father and Hettie, or if I even bothered to offer one. We were both anxious to get back to London, Nick to his spying and I to mine. Father was hurt. The west for him was the land of youth, not only the scene of his childhood holidays— his grandfather had kept a farm on a rocky islet in Clew Bay— but the place where his people had originated, mysterious autochthons stepping out of the mists of the western seaboard, the mighty O Measceoils, warriors, pirates, fierce clansmen all, who just in time to avoid the ravages of the Famine had changed their religion and Anglicised the family name and turned themselves into Yeats’s hard-riding country gentlemen. I had no wish to introduce Nick to these legends, and much less to walk with him through the sites where had stood the stone cottages of my forebears and the base beds from which they had sprung. In these matters he and I observed a decorous silence: he did not speak of his Jewishness nor I of my Catholic blood. We were both, in our own ways, self-made men. Three days at Carrick-drum was enough for us; we packed up our books and our unworn hiking boots and took ship for what I realised now was home. Leaving Ireland and my father’s house, I had the sense of having committed a small but particularly brutish crime. Throughout the journey I could feel my father’s wounded, forgiving gaze fixed like a spot of heat on the already burning back of my neck.

London that autumn had an abstracted, provisional air; the atmosphere was hectic and hollow, like that of the last day of school term, or the closing half-hour of a drunken party. People would drift off into silence in the middle of a sentence and look up at the tawny sunlight in the windows and sigh. The streets were like stage-sets, scaled down, two-dimensional, their bustle and busyness tinged with the pathos of something set in motion only so that it might be violently halted. The squawks of the news-vendors had an infernal ring—cockney chirpiness has always grated on my nerves. At evening the sunset glare in the sky above the roofs seemed the afterglow of a vast conflagration. It was all so banal, these hackneyed signs and wonders. Fear was banal.

For some, the times were grimly congenial. Querell, for instance, was in his element. I remember meeting him in the Strand one drizzly afternoon late in that November. We went to a Lyons Corner House and drank tea that was the same colour as the rain falling on the pavement outside the steamy window where we sat. Querell looked even more the spiv than usual, in his narrow suit and brown trilby. Within minutes, it seemed, he had filled to overflowing the tin ashtray on the table between us. I was well established at the Department by then, but I rarely saw him there—he was on the Balkans desk, I was in Languages— and when we chanced upon each other in the outside world like this we felt embarrassed and constrained, like two clergymen meeting the morning after an accidental encounter in a brothel. At least, I felt embarrassment, I felt constraint; I do not think Querell would ever allow himself to succumb to sensations so weak-kneed and obvious. I could not take seriously the self-deluding, school-brigade, boys-with-men’s-moustaches world of military intelligence; the atmosphere of mingled jollity and earnestness in which the Department went about its work was amusing at first, then obscurely shaming, then merely tedious. Such asses one had to deal with! Querell was different, though; I suspected he despised the place as much as I did. It had taken me a long time, and much vigorous yanking on the lattices of the old-boy network, to get in; in the end Leo Rothenstein managed it for me. He was—and had been for years, I was surprised to discover—something very high up in the Middle East section.

“It’s in the blood,” Querell said, with a pursed smile. “His family has been running spies for centuries. They got early news of Waterloo and made their fortune out of it on the Stock Exchange, did you know that? Crafty; very crafty.” Querell did not care for Jews. He was watching me out of those unblinking, protuberant pale eyes of his, two lazy streams of cigarette smoke flaring out of his nostrils. I busied myself eating a sticky bun. His mention of spies had startled me; it was not a word Department people used, even amongst ourselves. Sometimes it crossed my mind that he too, like me, might be more than he was admitting—he had just published a thriller called The Double Agent. The idea of having Querell as a secret sharer was not appealing. When I looked up from my bun he shifted his gaze to the legs of a passing waitress. I had never succeeded in pinning down his politics. He would talk of the Cliveden crowd or Mosley and his thugs with a sort of wistful admiration, then in the next breath he would be the worker’s champion. In my innocence I thought it was his Catholicism that afforded him this breadth of casuistry. At Maules one weekend when the Moscow show trials were going on he overheard me castigating Stalin. “Thing is, Maskell,” he said, “a bad pope doesn’t make a bad church.” Leo Rothenstein, draped on a sofa, his long legs crossed before him, shifted himself and laughed lazily. “My God,” he said, “a Bolshie in the house! My poor papa would turn in his grave.”

“Have you seen Bannister recently?” Querell asked now, still with his eye on the waitress’s crooked seams. “I hear he’s taken up with the Fascists.”

Boy was working at the BBC, in charge of what he portentously referred to as Talks. He was endearingly proud of this job, and regaled us with stories about Lord Reith and his boyfriends, which at the time we refused to believe. By then he too was with the Department; after Munich, pretty well everyone in our set had joined the Secret Service, or been press-ganged into it. I imagine we were not unaware that intelligence work was likely to be far preferable to soldiering—or am I being unfair to us? Boy took to his undercover role with childish enthusiasm. He would always love the secret life, and missed it painfully after he defected. He enjoyed especially the role-playing; for cover, he had lately joined a Tory ginger group of Nazi sympathisers calling itself the Chain (“I’m pulling the Chain for Uncle Joe,” was Boy’s catchphrase), and had attached himself to a notorious pro-Hitler MP called Richard Someone, I have forgotten the name, an ex-Guards officer and a lunatic, for whom he was acting (the right word) as unofficial private secretary. His chief duty, he told us, was to be a pander for the Captain, who had an insatiable appetite for working-class young men. Recently Boy and his mad Captain had undertaken a jaunt to the Rhineland, escorting a band of schoolboys from the East End on a visit to a Hitler Youth camp. It was the kind of preposterous thing that went on in the run-up to war. The pair had returned in ecstasies (“Oh, those blond beasts!”), though Captain Dick had contracted a painful dose of anal thrush; not so clean-limbed after all, die Hitlerjugend.

“The best part of the joke,” I said, “is that the trip was sponsored by the Foreign Relations Council of the Church of England!”

Querell did not laugh, only gave me one of his swift, bug-eyed glances, which always made me feel as if a bottle had been rolled across my face, the way at country house parties they used to roll empty champagne bottles over the ballroom floors to impart a final polishing (ah, the days of our youth—the youth of the world!).

“Maybe you should have gone with them,” he said.

That gave me pause. I could feel myself beginning to redden.

“Not my kind of thing, old boy,” I said, meaning it to come out lazy and insolent, though it sounded, to my own ears, incriminatingly prim. I passed on quickly. “Boy says the Krauts have finished rearming and are just waiting for the word.”

Querell shrugged. “Well, we hardly needed to send a pansy over to find out that for us, did we.”

“He and the Captain were shown around an aerodrome. Line upon line of Messerschmitts, all pointing at us.”

We were silent. In the traffic noise from the street outside I seemed to hear the whirr of propellers, and I shivered with eager anticipation: let it come, let it all come! Querell looked idly about the room. At the table next to us a fat man in a greasy suit was speaking vehemently in a low voice to a wan young woman with hennaed hair—his daughter, it seemed—telling her in a level undertone that she was nothing but a tart; they were to turn up again a couple of years later, disguised as a Jewish refugee and his doomed young wife, on board The Orient Express, the first of Querell’s overrated Balkan thrillers.

“I wonder if we shall survive,” Querell said. “All this, I mean.” He waved a hand, taking in the other tables, and the waitress, and the woman at the cash register, and the fat man and his miserable daughter, and, beyond them, England.

“What if we don’t?” I said, cautiously. “Something better might take our place.”

“You want Hitler to win?”

“Not Hitler, no.”

It is hard now to recapture the peculiar thrill of moments such as that, when one risked everything on a throwaway remark. It was akin to the rush of vertiginous glee I felt when I made my first parachute jump. There was the same sensation of being light as air and yet far weightier, of far more significance, somehow, than a mere mortal should ever expect to be. Thus a minor god might feel, flying down from the clouds to try out a disguise on one of Arcady’s more experienced nymphs. We sat, Querell and I, unspeaking, looking at each other. That was another thing about those moments of absolute risk: the powerful, charged neutrality that took over one’s facial expressions and one’s tone of voice. When I met T. S. Eliot at a Palace function after the war, I recognised at once in that shadowed, camel-eyed gaze and timbreless voice the marks of the lifelong, obsessive dissembler.

Querell was the first to look away; the moment passed.

“Well,” he said, “it hardly matters who wins, since it will be left to the Yanks as usual to come in and mop up after us.”

We went off then and got drunk together at the Gryphon. When I look back, I am surprised at how much time I have spent in Querell’s company over the years. There was no warmth between us, and we had few interests in common. His Catholicism was as incomprehensible to me as he claimed my Marxism was to him; though each was a believer, neither could credit the other’s faith. Yet there was a bond of some sort between us. Ours was like one of those odd attachments at school, when two unlovely misfits sidle up to each other out of mutual need and form a sort of humid, hapless friendship. The Gryphon and the George were our version of the trees behind the playing fields, where we could sit through long hours of shared melancholy in a haze of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes, indulging in occasional rancorous exchanges, and glaring and grinning at our fellow drinkers. Being with Querell was, for me, a kind of slumming. I did not subscribe—in those days, anyway—to his Manichean version of the world, yet I found myself drawn to the idea of it, this dark, befouled yet curiously dauntless place through which he slouched, always alone, with a fag in his mouth and his hat raked to the side and one hand ever ready in his jacket pocket, cradling that imaginary gun.

It was a tumultuous evening. After the Gryphon, when we were good and soused, we collected his Riley from the RAC garage and drove to an awful dive somewhere off the Edgware Road. Querell had said the place specialised in child prostitutes. There was a low basement room that smelled of carbolic, with a balding, red-velvet sofa and spindle-backed cane chairs and brown lino on the floor scarred from trodden-on cigarette butts. A feebly burning table lamp wore a crooked shade the stuff of which had the uncanny look of dried human skin. The girls sitting about vacantly in their slips had ceased being children a long time ago. The couple who ran the place were out of a seaside postcard, she a big blancmange with a wig of brass curls, he a lean little whippet of a fellow with a Hitler tash and a tic in one eye. Mrs. Gill kept sweeping in and out of the room like a watchful duenna, while Adolf plied us with brown ale, scurrying about at a crouch with a tin tray expertly balanced on the bunched fingers of his left hand while with his right he deftly distributed bottles and grimed glasses. It all seemed to me very jolly, in a bleary, sin-soaked, Stanley Spencerish sort of way (Belshazzar’s Feast at Cookham). I found myself sitting with a freckled, red-haired girl perched on my lap in the attitude of an overgrown infant, her head resting awkwardly on my shoulder and her knees braced sideways against my chest, while under us the cane chair cackled scornfully to itself. She told me with great pride that her mam and dad had once been Pearly King and Queen (do they still have that custom?), and offered to suck me off for ten bob. I fell asleep, or passed out briefly, and when I came to, the girl was gone, and so were her companions, and Querell, too, though presently he reappeared, with a strand of his thin, oiled hair hanging down his forehead; I found it very worrying, that bit of discomposure in one usually so fanatically shined and smoothed.

We left, and climbed the basement steps to the street, not without difficulty, and found that it was raining heavily—what a surprise the weather always is when one is drunk—and Querell said he knew another place where there were definitely children for sale, and when I said I had no wish to sleep with a child he went into a sulk and refused to drive the car, so I took the keys from him, although I had never driven before, and we jerked and juddered off through the rain in the direction of Soho, I leaning forward anxiously with my nose almost touching the streaming windscreen, and Querell slumped beside me in wordless anger, his arms furiously folded. I was so drunk by now I could not focus properly and had to keep one eye shut in order to stop the white line in the middle of the road from splitting in two. Before I knew where I was going we had pulled up outside Leo Rothenstein’s house in Poland Street, where Nick was already living-most of us would lodge there, on and off, in the coming years; it was what would nowadays be called a commune, I suppose. There was a light in Nick’s window. Querell leaned on the bell-by now he had forgotten whatever it was he had been sulking about—while I stood with my face uplifted to the rain, declaiming Blake:

Awake! awake 0 sleeper of the fond of shadows, wake! expand!

Nick opened a window and stuck out his head and swore at us. “For Christ’s sake, go home, Victor, there’s a good chap.” He came down, however, and let us in. He was in evening dress, looking very pale and satanic. We followed him up the narrow stairs, bumping from banisters to wall and back again, and Querell took up the refrain of Jerusalem:

In the flat a small after-party party was in progress. Boy was there, and Abercrombie the poet, and Lady Mary Somebody, and the Lydon sisters. They had been to a party at the Rothenstein mansion in Portman Square (Why wasn’t I invited?) and were finishing a magnum of champagne. Querell and I stopped in the doorway and goggled at them.

“I say,” I said, “you all do look splendid.”

And they did: like a flock of languorous penguins.

Nick did his nasty laugh.

“How English you’re coming to sound, Vic,” he said. “Quite the native.”

He knew very well how much I hated to be called Vic. Querell drew a bead on him and in a slurred voice said, “At least he didn’t come here via Palestine.”

The Lydon sisters giggled.

Nick fetched a couple of beer glasses from the kitchen and poured a gulp of champagne into each. Now I noticed for the first time, sitting in an armchair in a corner, ankle crossed on knee, an unknown yet disturbingly familiar, delicate youth in a silk evening suit, with brilliantined hair brushed tightly back, smoking a cigarette and watching me with cool amusement out of shadowed eyes.

“Hello, Victor,” this person said. “You look somewhat the worse for wear.”

It was Baby. The others laughed at my astonishment.

“Dodo here bet her a gallon of bubbly she couldn’t get away with it,” Nick said. Lady Mary—Dodo—clasped her hands in her lap and drew her thin shoulders together and put on an expression of comic ruefulness. Nick made a face at her. “She lost,” he said. “It was the damnedest thing. Even Leo didn’t recognise her.”

“And I made a pass at her,” Boy said. “So that will tell you.”

More laughter. Nick crossed the room with the champagne bottle.

“Come on, old girl,” he said, “we’ve got to finish up your winnings.”

Baby, still with her eyes on me, lifted her glass to be filled. Dark-blue velvet curtains were drawn over the tall window behind her chair, and on a low table a clutch of washed-pink roses was expiring in a copper bowl, the packed petals heavy and limp as wetted cloth. The room shrank, became a long, low box, like the inside of something, a camera, or a magic lantern. I stood and swayed, with champagne bubbles detonating in my nostrils, and, as I watched them, in my poor fuddled vision brother and sister seemed to merge and separate and merge again, dark on dark and pale on glimmering pale, Pierrot and Pierrette. Nick glanced at me and smiled and said:

“Better sit down, Victor, you have a distinct look of Ben Turpin.”

A blank then, and then I am sitting on the floor, beside Baby’s chair, my legs crossed under me tailor-fashion and my chin practically leaning on the armrest beside her suddenly significant hand with its short, fatly tapering fingers and blood-red nails; I want to take each one of those fingers between my lips and suck and suck until the painted nails turn transparent as fish-scales. I am telling her earnestly about Diderot’s theory of statues. There is a stage of drunkenness when all at once one seems to step with startling, with laughable, ease through a door that all night one had been struggling in vain to open. On the other side all is light and definition and the calm of certitude.

“Diderot said,” I said, “Diderot said that what we do is, we erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves—idealised, you know, but still recognisable—and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness. This is the moral imperative. I think it’s awfully clever, don’t you? I know that’s how I feel. Only there are times when I can’t tell which is the statue and which is me.” This last struck me as profoundly sad and I thought I might cry. Behind me Boy was loudly reciting “The Ball of Inverness” and the Lydon sisters were delightedly shrieking. I covered Baby’s hand with mine. How cool it was; cool, and excitingly unresponsive. “What do you think,” I said in a voice thick with emotion. “Tell me what you think.”

She sat in her chair as motionless as—yes, as motionless as a statue, one silk-trousered leg still crossed on the other and her arms stretched out along the armrests, androgynous, hieratic and faintly, calmly crazed-looking, with her hair drawn back so tight her eyes were slanted at the corners; her head was turned toward me, and she looked at me, saying nothing. Or looked not at me, but around me, rather. It was a way she had. Her gaze would stray no farther than one’s face yet one would seem to be taken in all of a piece, defined, somehow, and set apart, as if by her scrutiny she were generating around one a kind of invisible corona, a forcefield inside of which one stood isolated, inspected, alone. Do I give her too much weight, do I make her seem a sort of sphinx, a sort of she-monster, cruel and cold and impossibly, untouchably distant? She was just a human, like me, groping her way through the world, yet when she looked at me like that I felt my sins shine out of me, illumined forth for all to see. It was an intoxicating sensation, especially for one already so intoxicated.

At four in the morning Querell drove me home. In Leicester Square he ran the car gently into a lamp-post, and we sat for a while listening to the radiator ticking and watching an illuminated advertisement for Bovril blinking on and off. The square was deserted. Squalls of wind pushed dead leaves back and forth over the pavements from which the recently ceased rain was drying in big map-shaped patches. It was all very desolate and beautiful and sad, and I thought again that I might weep.

“Bloody people,” Querell muttered, starting up the stalled engine. “Bloody war will fix ’em.”

At dawn I sprang awake suddenly, completely, in a transport of certitude. I knew exactly what I must do. I did not so much get out of bed as levitate from it; I felt like one of Blake’s shining figures, transformed and aflame. The telephone rattled in my hands. Baby answered on the first ring. She did not sound as if she had been asleep. Behind her voice there lay a vast, waiting silence.

“Look here,” I said, “I have to marry you.” She did not reply. I imagined her floating in that sea of silence, fronds of black silk undulating about her. “Vivienne? Are you there?”

How strange her name sounded.

“Yes,” she said, “I’m here.” She seemed as always to be suppressing laughter, but I did not mind.

“Will you marry me?”

She paused again. A seagull alighted on the sill outside my window and looked at me with a bright, blank eye. The sky was the colour of pale mud. I had the sense that all this had happened before.

“All right,” she said.

And hung up.

We met later that day for lunch at the Savoy. It was a curious occasion, strained and somewhat stagey, as if we were taking part in one of those self-consciously smart drawing-room comedies of the time. The restaurant was littered with people we knew, which intensified our sense of being on display. Baby wore her habitual black, a suit with padded shoulders and a narrow skirt, which in daylight had to my eye the look of widow’s weeds. She was as always both watchful and remote, though I thought I could detect a hint of agitation in the way she kept reaching out and fiddling with my cigarette case, turning it this way and that on the tablecloth. I did not help matters by saying, first thing, how awful I was feeling. And I was: my eyes felt as if they had been torn out and held over hot coals and then thrust back into the throbbing sockets. I showed her my shaking hands, told her how my heart was wobbling. She made a grimace of disdain.

“Why do men always boast about their hangovers?”

“There’s so little else for us to be boastful about, I suppose, these days,” I said sulkily.

We looked away from each other. The silence stretched, thinner and thinner. We were like hesitant swimmers who have come to the water’s grey and uninviting edge. Baby was the first to plunge in.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve never been proposed to over the telephone before.”

Her laughter had a nervous sparkle. She had recently ended a messy affair with some sort of an American. My Yank, was how she would refer to him, with a bitter, resigned little smile. No one seemed to have met him. It came to me with a kind of slow amazement how little I knew about her.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sorry, but it seemed the thing to do, at the time.”

“And does it still?”

“What?”

“Seem the thing to do.”

“Well, yes, of course. Don’t you think?”

She paused. That gaze of hers, it seemed to originate somehow at the back of her eyes.

“Nick is right,” she said, “you are turning into an Englishman.”

The waiter appeared then and we bent with relief over our menus. During lunch we talked in a studiedly desultory fashion about my new post at the Institute, Nick’s bizarre hiring of himself as an adviser to the Rothensteins, Boy Bannister’s latest scrape, the coming war. I had assumed she would have no politics and was obscurely irritated to discover that she was fiercely anti-appeasement—quite bellicose, in fact. While our plates were being cleared away she opened my cigarette case and took a cigarette—from the brusqueness of her movements, she too seemed irritated—and paused with the match burning and said:

“You do love me, I take it?”

The waiter glanced at her quickly and away. I took her wrist and drew her hand toward me and blew out the match. We had started on our second bottle of wine.

“Yes,” I said, “I love you.”

I had never said it to anyone before, except Hettie, when I was little. Baby nodded once, briskly, as if I had cleared up some small, niggling matter that had been on her mind for a long time.

“You’ll have to see Mummy, you know,” she said. I stared blankly. She permitted herself an ironic smile. “To ask for my hand.”

We both looked at where my fingers were still lightly holding her wrist. Had there really been an audience, the moment would have raised a scatter of laughter.

“Shouldn’t it be your father that I talk to?” I said. Big Beaver was about to publish a monograph of mine on German baroque architecture.

“Oh, he won’t care.”

In the taxi we kissed, turning sideways suddenly toward each other and grappling awkwardly, like a pair of shop-window mannequins come jerkily alive. I remembered the same thing happening, what, six, seven years before? and thought how strange life was. Her nose was chill and faintly damp. I touched a breast. A strong cold wind was blowing along Oxford Street. Baby leaned her forehead against my neck. Her fat-fingered little hand rested in mine.

“What shall I call you?” she said. “Victor is hardly a name, is it. More a title. Like someone in ancient Rome.” She lifted her head and looked at me. The lights of the shut shops as we passed them by flashed in miniature across her eyes, like so many slides flickering past the lenses of a faulty projector. In the darkness her smile seemed bright and brave, as if she were holding back tears, “I don’t love you, you know,” she said softly.

I closed my fingers on hers.

“I know that,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter, does it.”

I went up to Oxford by train on one of those deceptively soft, glowing days of late October. Everything was melodramatically aflame, so that the world seemed poised not on the edge of winter but of some grand, blazoned beginning. I was wearing a new and rather smart suit, and as we sped along I admired the line of the trouser-leg and the chestnut gleam on the toecaps of my well-polished shoes. I had a clear and definite image of myself: smooth, well-groomed, primped and pomaded, a man with a mission. I was quite calm about the impending confrontation with Mrs. Beaver, was even looking forward to it, in a mood of amused condescension. What could I have to fear from such a scatter-brain? Yet as we went along, I began to be affected by something in the inexorability of the way the lumbering, seemingly unstoppable train ticked off the station halts, and the smoke rolling past the window took on an infernal aspect, and by the time we drew into Oxford, blank terror had fixed its claw upon my heart.

The maid who opened the door to me was new, a heavy-haunched, flat-faced girl who gave me a sceptical look and took my hat as if it were something dead I had handed her. The Brevoorts were proud of their reputation for keeping impossible servants; it fed Mrs. Beaver’s bohemian notions of herself. “Madam is in the pantry,” the girl said, and I found the nurseryrhyme echo of it oddly disconcerting. There was a warm, sickly-sweet odour. I followed the girl’s joggling haunches through to the drawing room, where she left me, stepping backwards and closing the door on me with a definite smirk. I stood in the middle of the floor listening to my heart and looking through the bottle-glass window panes at the iridescent and somehow derisively gaudy garden. Time passed. I thought of the first time I had been in this room, nearly a decade ago, with Nick lounging on the sofa and Baby upstairs playing her jazz records. I felt suddenly, immensely old, and saw myself now not as the polished man of the world I had seemed at the outset of my journey, but a sort of freak, desiccated and obscenely preserved, like one of those fairground midgets, a man in a boy’s wrinkled body.

Without warning the door flew open and Mrs. Brevoort stood there in her Sarah Bernhardt pose, a hand on the knob and her head thrown back, her bared embonpoint pallidly aheave.

“Plums!” she said. “Such impossible fecundity.”

She was wearing a tasselled shawl affair and a voluminous velvet dress the colour of old blood, and both arms were busy almost to the elbows with fine gold bangles, like a set of springs, which suggested the circus ring more than the seraglio. I realised what it was she always reminded me of in her looks: one of Henry James’s worldly schemers, a Mme. Merle, or a Mrs. Assingham, but without their wit, or their acuity. She advanced, moving as always as if mounted on a hidden trolley, and grasped me by the shoulders and kissed me dramatically on both cheeks, then thrust me from her and held me at arm’s length and gazed at me for a long moment with an expression of tragic weight, slowly nodding her great head.

“Baby spoke to you?” I said tentatively.

She nodded more deeply still, so that her chin almost dropped to her breast.

“Vivienne,” she said, “telephoned. Her father and I have had a long chat. We are so …” It was impossible to tell what might have followed. She went on contemplating me, seemingly lost in thought, then suddenly she roused herself and grew brisk. “Come along,” she said, “I need a man’s help.”

The pantry was a stylised model of a witch’s cave. Through a low little window giving on to the vegetable garden there entered a dense, sinister green glow which seemed something at once more and less than daylight. An enormous vat of plum jam was turbidly boiling on a squat black gas stove that stood with delicate feet braced, like a weightlifter about to bend to his task, while on the draining board beside the chipped sink there was ranged a waiting squadron of jam jars of varying sizes. Mrs. B. bent over the bubbling cauldron, her eyes slitted and the wings of her great beaked nose flaring, and lifted a ladleful of the jam and examined it doubtfully.

“Max expects one to do this sort of thing,” she said, turning off the gas, “I can’t think why.” She glanced at me sideways with a Grimalkin grin. “He’s a great tyrant, you know. Would you like an apron? And do take off your jacket.”

I was to hold the jars while she ladled the jam into them. “You’ve got to do it while the jam is hot, you see, or the seals won’t work.” The first jar cracked from the heat of the boiling fruit, in the second the jam overflowed and burned my fingers, at which I uttered an oath, which Mrs. B. pretended not to hear.

“Well,” she said, “perhaps we should allow it to cool a little. Let’s go into the garden. Such a perfect day. Should I offer you a drink, or is it too early? Maude shall bring us something. Maude! Dear me, where is the girl. Oh, there you are; how you do lurk. What will you take, Mr. Maskell? People tell me my dandelion wine is really quite good. Gin? Well, yes, I’m sure we must have, somewhere. Maude, bring Mr. Maskell some gin. And … tonic, and so on.” Maude looked at me and let another sardonic smile cross her large face briefly, and slouched off. Mrs. Brevoort sighed. “I suspect her of insolence, but I can never quite catch her in the act. They are so sly, you know, and so clever, too, in their way.”

The garden was at its last, glorious gasp, all gold and green and umber and rose madder. A strong autumnal sun was shining. We walked over the crisp grass, smelling eucalyptus and the thin, hot stink of verbena, and sat down on a weather-beaten wooden bench that knelt at a tipsy angle against a rough stone wall under a tangled arch of old roses. A very bower of unbliss.

“Is your hand terribly painful?” Mrs. B. said. “Perhaps we should have put something on it.”

“Dock leaves,” I said.

“What?”

“It was a cure my mother had. My stepmother.”

“I see.” She cast about the garden with an air of vague helplessness. “I don’t know that there are any dock leaves …”

Maude approached then with my gin, and a green goblet of urine-coloured liquid for Mrs. Beaver which I took to be the celebrated dandelion wine. I knocked back half my drink in one go. Mrs. B. once more pretended not to notice.

“You were telling me about your stepmother,” she said, and took a sip of wine, eyeing me keenly over the rim of the glass.

“Was I? Her name is Hermione,” I said, floundering.

“Very … pretty. And is she Irish, too?”

“Yes. Her people were Quakers.”

“Quakers!” she said, uttering the word as a high-pitched squawk, and opened her eyes very wide and clapped a hand with fingers splayed to her sloped chest with an audible little smack. I had the impression she was not at all sure what a Quaker was. “Well, of course, one can’t be held accountable for one’s people,” she said, “I should know that!” And she threw back her head and produced a great full raucous trill of laughter, humourless and mad, like the heroine’s laugh in a tragic opera. I thought of mentioning my maternal connection with the Queen; one isn’t a snob, of course, but it is a thing that does impress.

I had finished my gin, and kept twirling the empty glass ostentatiously in my fingers, but she refused to take the hint.

“And you have a brother, yes?”

She had suddenly become very interested in the nap of the velvet stuff of her dress where it was stretched over her large, round knees.

“Yes,” I said. My voice sounded extraordinarily thin and strained, like that of a meek murderer replying to the prosecution’s first, frightening question.

“Yes,” she said, softly. “Because you did not say.”

“It did not arise.”

“We rather thought you were an only child.”

“I’m sorry.” I was not sure what I was apologising for. A wave of anguished anger broke over me. Nick: Nick had told them. Mrs. Brevoort placed her wineglass on the bench beside her and rose and paced a little way on to the lawn, and stopped and turned, gazing pensively down upon the grass at her feet.

“Of course,” she said, “we should require a certificate.”

“A certificate …?”

“Yes. From a doctor, you know; Max will find a dependable man. So often these things run in the family, and we could not dream of exposing Vivienne to anything of that nature. You do see that, don’t you?” She was standing now canted forward at a slight angle, her hands clasped under her bosom, gazing at me with an earnest, kindly, melancholy little smile. “We have no doubt that you, Mr. Maskell—”

“Call me Victor, please,” I murmured. A bubble of manic, miserable laughter was now pushing its hot way upward in my chest and threatening to choke me.

“We have no doubt,” she pressed on, irresistible as a battleship, “that you, of course, are not personally… infected, if I may put it that way. But it’s the blood, you see.” She brought up her clasped hands and tucked them under her chin in a winsomely histrionic gesture and turned and paced a few steps to the left and back again. “We are, Mr. Maskell, despite extremes of sophistication, a primitive people. I mean, of course, my people. The Hebrew race has suffered much, and no doubt will again in the future”—she was right: her brother and his wife and their three children were to perish in Treblinka—“but throughout the thousands of years of our history we have held fast to essentials. The family. Our children. And blood, Mr. Maskell: blood.” She dropped her hands from under her chin and turned and paced again, this time to the right, and again returned to centre stage. I felt like a theatre-goer trapped in the middle of a long second act who hears, outside, a fire engine howling past in the direction of his own house.

“Mrs. Brevoort—” I began, but she held up a hand as broad as a traffic policeman’s.

“Please,” she said, with a large, icy smile. “Two words more, and then silence, I promise.” I could see the maid moving about behind the drawing room window and toyed desperately with the possibility of shouting for her to bring me another drink—to bring the bloody bottle. Is there anything more dispiriting than an empty, hand-warmed, sticky gin glass? I thought of sucking on the slice of lemon but knew that even that would not have been sufficient sign of desperation for Mrs. B., in full flight as she was. “When Vivienne telephoned,” she was saying, “to tell us of your engagement, which came, you understand, as a great … surprise”—shock was the word she had suppressed—“to her father and to me, I shut myself away in the music room for an entire afternoon. I had much to think about. Music is always a help. I played Brahms. Those great, dark chords. So filled with sadness and yet so … so sustaining.” She bowed her head and let her eyelids gently close and stood for a moment as if in silent prayer, and then looked at me again suddenly, piercingly. “She is our only daughter, Mr. Maskell; our only, precious girl.”

I stood up. The musky smell of roses, along with everything else, was giving me a headache.

“Mrs. Brevoort,” I said, “Vivienne is twenty-nine. She is not a child. We love each other”—at that she shot up her thick, shiny eyebrows and gave her head a dismissive little toss, Mrs. Touchett to the life—“and we think it is time that we should marry.” I faltered; somehow that was not what I had meant to say, or at least not how I had meant to say it. “My brother suffers from a syndrome the name of which would mean nothing to you and which, besides, I have temporarily forgotten.” This was going from bad to worse. “His condition is not hereditary. It is the result of a depletion of oxygen to the brain while he was in the womb.” At that word she gave a definite start; I pressed on. “We would have hoped for your blessing, and that of Mr. Brevoort, but if you withhold it we shall go ahead regardless. I feel you should understand that.” Matters suddenly were improving, as the rhetoric heated. I could feel an invisible starched stock sprouting up about my throat, and would not have been surprised to look down and find myself in frock coat and riding boots: Lord Warburton himself could not have struck a haughtier aspect. I would have felt thoroughly in command were it not for the troubling persistence of that word womb, still wallowing between us like a half-inflated football that neither of us would dare either to pick up or kick away. We were silent. I could hear myself breathe, a soft, stertorous roaring down the nostrils. Mrs. B. made a peculiar little movement of her upper body, half shrug half bridle, and said:

“Of course you shall have our blessing. Vivienne shall have our blessing. That is not the matter at all.”

“Then what is the matter?”

She made to speak but instead stood silent, her mouth working and her eyes going glossily out of focus. I was afraid she might be having a seizure—the word apoplexy popped up in my mind, and I thought, I don’t know why, of the Punch and Judy show that used to be set up on Carrickdrum strand in summer when I was a child, and which filled me with unease even while I shrieked with laughter—but then, to my astonishment and dismay, she began to weep. I had never seen her lose control like this before, and would not see it again. I suspect she was as surprised as I was. She was angry at herself too, which added tears of rage to whatever the other kind were. “Ridiculous, ridiculous,” she muttered, scrubbing at her eyes, her bangles jingling, and shaking her head sideways as if to dislodge something from her ear, and I caught a glimpse of what she would look like as an old, old woman. I felt sorry for her, but there was another feeling also, which I was ashamed of but could not deny: it was exultation; nasty, secret and small-scale, but exultation for all that. These are the moments, rare, and seldom as clear-cut as this one, when power passes from one opponent to another, silently, instantaneously, like an electric charge jumping between electrodes. I began to offer her some futile and probably spurious words of comfort but she brushed them aside with an angry sweep of her hand, as if pushing away a wasp. She was quickly regaining control of herself. Her tears ceased. She gave a great sniff and lifted her head and pointed her chin at me.

“I do not wish us to be enemies, Mr. Maskell.”

“No,” I said, “that would not be wise.”

Max Brevoort arrived a little after that, when I was standing in the drawing room again and Mrs. B. had gone off somewhere to repair her face. I thought the tip of his thin nose quivered as he sniffed carefully at the atmosphere. He had a marvellously fine sense for the danger of an occasion. He did have something of the beaver about him, with his sleekness and his hand-rubbing and that delicately probing snout.

“I’m told we are to gain a son,” he said, and gave me one of his fierce, humourless grins. “Congratulations.”

There seemed nothing more to say after that and we stood awkwardly, looking at our feet. Then we both began to speak at once and lapsed again into painful silence. Mrs. B. came back, and was her accustomed imperial self again, but I caught Max giving her a sharp, searching glance and deciding, on the evidence, to proceed with caution.

“Perhaps we should have a drink?” he said, and added, gingerly: “To mark the occasion.”

“Yes, indeed,” his wife said, flashing at him a brilliant, brittle smile. “Some champagne. We’ve been having a chat.” She turned to me. “Haven’t we, Mr. Maskell.”

“Victor,” I said.

The wedding was a quiet affair, as the saying was in those days. The ceremony took place at Marylebone register office. The Beavers were there, Nick and his parents and an ancient aunt I had never met before—she had money—and Boy Bannister, of course, and Leo Rothenstein, and a couple of Baby’s girlfriends, mature flappers in ridiculous hats. My father and Hettie had come over the night before on the ferry, and looked frightened and country-mousey, and I was embarrassed for them, and by them. Nick was best man. Afterwards we went to Claridges for lunch, and Boy got drunk and made a disgraceful speech, throughout which Mrs. Beaver sat with a terrible, fixed smile, twisting and twisting a napkin in her hands as if she were wringing the neck of some small, white, boneless animal. The honeymoon was spent in Taormina. It was hot, and Mount Etna wore a stationary, menacing plume of smoke. We read a lot, and explored the ruins, and in the evenings, over dinner, Baby told me about her former lovers, of whom there had been an impressive number. I do not know why she felt the need to recount these adventures, which sounded uniformly melancholy, to me; perhaps it was a form of exorcism. I did not mind. It was even pleasant, in a peculiar way, to sit sipping my wine while this ghostly line of bankers and polo players and hapless Americans threaded its way through the hotel’s lugubriously ornate dining room and disappeared into the steamy, starstruck night.

Sex turned out to be easier than I had expected, or feared. I was pleased to encounter a version of Baby—warm, yielding, languorous, even—very different from the alarmingly hard-edged one I had married, while she was amused, and touched, to discover that she had married a thirty-one-year-old virgin. I had some difficulty getting going, and she laughed, and pushed back her hair, and said, “Poor darling, let me help you, I’m a sucker for this sort of thing.” On our last night we made a solemn, if tipsy, vow that we would not have children. And by Christmas she was pregnant.