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turned out, with an absence of surprise on my part, to be Mrs Henneker, one needed a kind of directional hearing-sense to pick up the gossip flowing by. If Roger had Collingwood against him, it was serious for us all – but I was captured again by Mrs Henneker, who was thinking of writing a life of her dead husband, who had been a Rear-Admiral, monstrously treated, so she explained to me, by the Board of Admiralty.
    Across the table, Cave, who was a gourmet, was eating without pleasure; but, since for him quantity could be made to turn into quality, he was also eating like a glutton, or a hungry child.
    Once more, maddeningly, a whiff of disapproval from the top of the table. A person whose name I could not catch was in trouble. I caught a remark from Lord Bridgewater, plethoric, pineapple-headed: ‘He’s letting us down, you know what I mean.’ To which Collingwood replied, ‘It won’t do.’ And a little later, mixed with a clarification about the Rear-Admiral, I heard Collingwood again: ‘He’s got to be stopped.’ I had no idea who the man was. I had no idea, either, what kind of trouble he was in – except that I should have been prepared to bet that it wasn’t sexual. If it had been, Diana would have been flashing signals of amusement, and the others would not have been so condemnatory and grave. Whatever they said in public, in private they were as sexually tolerant as people could be. They could not forgive public scandals, and sometimes they made special rules. In private, though, and within their own circle, or any circle which touched theirs, no one cared what anyone ‘did’. Divorces – there had been several round this table, including Margaret’s. A nephew of Diana’s had been run in while picking up a guardsman in the Park: ‘That chap had hard luck,’ I had heard them say.
    Nevertheless, there was constraint in the air. Margaret and I, when we were alone, told each other that we were puzzled.
    Next morning, in mackintosh and Wellingtons, I went for a walk in the rain with Monty Cave. Until we turned back to the house, he was preoccupied – preoccupied, so it seemed, with sadness. I wished I knew him well enough to ask. Suddenly he burst out, in darts of flashing, malicious high spirits: wasn’t Diana showing strange signs of taste in modern music? wasn’t Mr Robinson a connoisseur? wasn’t she capable of assimilating any man’s tastes? And then: why did people have absurd pet-names? Sammikins – Bobbity – how would I like to be Lewikins? ‘Or perhaps,’ said Cave, with a fat man’s sparkle, ‘that’s what your friends do call you.’
    He wasn’t restful; his mood changed too fast for that, until we talked politics. Then he was lucid, imaginative, unexpectedly humane. For the first time, I could understand how he was making his reputation.
    Back in the house, I felt the constraint tightened again, as soon as the Quaifes arrived. I caught Margaret’s eye: in the midst of the party we couldn’t talk. Yet soon I realized that, whatever the reason, it was not that which had worried me most: for just before lunch, I found Caro and Diana drinking whisky, and agreeing that Gilbey must be got rid of.
    ‘You’re in on this, Lewis!’ cried Diana. ‘Old Bushey’ (Gilbey) ‘has never been the slightest bit of good to us, has he?’
    I sat down. ‘I don’t think this is his line,’ I said.
    ‘Don’t be pie-faced,’ said Diana. ‘He’s a nice, smart cavalry officer, and he’d have married an actress if they’d let him, but that’s his ceiling and you know it.’
    ‘He’d never have married an actress, he’s the biggest snob of the lot of them,’ said Caro.
    ‘Do you think the priests would have got to work?’ said Diana. Gilbey’s family was Catholic, and to these two he seemed to have lived in the backwoods. There was much hooting hilarity, which did not disguise the truth that Diana and Caro understood each other and meant business.
    ‘The point is,’ said Diana,