Mrs Allegramente, responding to the signal British, said: "You better quit Northern Ireland right now if you know what's good for you. I can read the signs."

"She has great gifts," Mrs Schoenbaum said, "as we shall see demonstrated after."

"What they did," Enderby continued, "was to put three sachets in a jug which already contained what they call coffee. The manager was not helpful. So I bought my own apparatus."

"You did, eh?" said the academic with uncalled-for animation. "You went out and bought the wherewithal and now make tea of the required strength in your own room?"

"I most certainly did and do. A kind of kettle and a big mug. Condensed milk. A box of sachets from a store called CHEEP CHEEP with the recorded song of a canary playing all the time."

"Is that so? Is that really so?" The academic's pisshued eyes glowed with interest. "It's in the private sector that the major events of human life occur. Ah," he said, "here is Lucille."

"My daughter," Mrs Schoenbaum said. A girl with jeans and a tee-shirt came in saying hi to everyone. The tee-shirt had Shakespeare as bigfisted flying Superman on it with the legend WILL POWER. "She is a dropout."

Enderby assumed that the term, combining knockout and coughdrop, was a slangy tribute to beauty not at once apparent. "She certainly is," he said. She advertised the lipoid virtues of what he had heard called junkfood, presumably food for junkies, whom, living in Tangiers, he knew all about. A girl greasy as though basted. He was glad when she said she had to split. She had things to do with her friends, to whom too she would say hi. She took her big worn blue arse away. She collided with the black servant who came in to say they could all eat if they wanted. Mrs Schoenbaum told him that Philip would not be eating with them, an aspect of his unsociability. The black man could give Philip a sandwich and a Coke. The black man seemed to demur and said things unintelligible but certainly rebellious in tone. Everybody helped each other to get out of the couch barge. Enderby slithered on wool and high polish. The black man cackled.

The dining room was like a great tomb with votive flowers and candles. Enderby could not see into its corners but he observed over his head an untenanted minstrels' gallery. There were highlighted what he took to be Cézannes, bad paintings of apples and bottles. "Paella," Mrs Schoenbaum announced, pronouncing the double clear L as a single dark one. "In honour of our guest who lives where it is part of the kwee zeen."

"Never see it in Tangiers," Enderby said. "Couscous country."

"Is that so," the lawyer said. The dish that the black man grousingly put on the table was all shells and bits of rubber and soggy rice. There was chlorinated water but no wine. You were supposed to bring your highball in with you. Enderby had finished his. He had been placed next to Mrs Allegramente. She now started again on the theme of suffering Ulster. Enderby was fed up. He said:

"Get this straight. I was brought up an English Catholic. I've no time for those bloody Orangemen there. They say an Orangeman's dinner consists of roast spuds, boiled spuds, chips and croquettes."

"Is that so."

"Pudgy bastards who discharge their carbohydrated energy in gross tribalism. No time for the sods. So hand the place over to the IRA for all I care. But it's no business of the Yanks."

Mrs Schoenbaum was a polite hostess. She ignored her British guest's snarl and said: "I hear great things of our project. I understand that things are going really well."

"Conflicts," Enderby said, and spat a bit of shell onto his fork end. "They will all be resolved. This was your idea, or so I'm credibly informed."

"It was the idea," Mrs Schoenbaum said, "of the Bard himself. Ask Mrs Allegramente." Enderby choked. "He spoke from the Happy House and said he was delighted that America had achieved two hundred years of free nationhood. He wished to be associated in song and dance with our celebrations." Enderby looked darkly, in the dark, at Mrs Allegramente, who looked, though chewing something unchewable, darkly back. "After dinner we shall tune in to him again. It's a great privilege," said Mrs Schoenbaum.

"He will not speak to the sceptical," Mrs Allegramente said.

"What," Enderby asked, "is this Happy House you spoke of?"

"The mansion of the blessed," Mrs Schoenbaum said. "He is with his fellow writers. He sent greetings from John Steinbeck, who would not speak for himself."

"I met Steinbeck," Enderby said, "when he was given, unjustly I thought and still think, the Nobel, oh I don't know though when you consider some of these dago scribblers who get it, think it was an unjust bestowal. There was a party for him given by Heinemann in London. I asked him what he was going to do with the prize money and he said: Fuck off." Before he could apologize, the academic said:

"Don't apologize. Oratio recta. Such a response I find deeply interesting. The private sector of a man's life."

"This was in public," Enderby said. "I apologize for what he said," he said to Mrs Schoenbaum. Mrs Schoenbaum, who evidently heard worse from her children, inclined queenlily. "I trust," he said with swimming brain, "the er bard keeps his language clean."

"He will not speak to sceptics," Mrs Allegramente said.

"What kind of sceptics do you have in mind? People who believe his works were written by the gonorrheal Earl of Rutland?"

"People who do not believe in the open line to the beyond," she said. "I don't think there's any use proceeding tonight," she told her hostess, who moaned in distress:

"Oh, Mrs Allegramente."

"You must flout the sceptic," the academic said. "You do not preach to the converted."

"I don't like," Enderby said, seeing in gloom a big cake like an Edwardian lady's hat swim from darkness to light and hearing coffee cups arattle, "the assumption that I don't believe. I am, after all, a poet. There are more things, et cetera. Horatio," he added to the lawyer. "My stepmother," he prepared to say.

"Perhaps you would prefer tea," Mrs Schoenbaum said. Enderby heard a black whine from the darkness.

"No, no, no. I shall have tea when I get back to my room. Along with the Late Late Show."

"The Late," the academic, "Late," tasting every word, "Show," said. It was clear he had never heard of it. "That is an amusing locution."

"It's on television every night," Enderby informed him. "An ancient ah movie interspersed with commercials for cutprice ah discs." He accepted a plate of white and bloody goo. The lawyer now began to disclose his madness. He said:

"Don't knock free enterprise. Free enterprise made this country what it is."

"I'm not ah er knocking anything -"

"We don't need smartass, pardon me Laura, Europeans coming over here to knock American institootions. This next year we have our bicentennial."

"As I am certainly well aware. My heartiest felicitations."

"We don't need smartass sarcasm, pardon me Laura and Mrs Allegramente, from smartass knockers of American traditions. We celebrate two centuries of American knowhow. Also liberty of conscience and expression."

"I most heartfeltly congratulate you."

"Don't give us that. There's a tone of voice that grates on me, pardon me Laura. We're your one bastion against the communist takeover. So don't knock."

"I certainly will not," Enderby promised.

There you are again," the lawyer cried. "It's the tone of voice."

"I can't help my bloody tone of voice," Enderby countered with truculence. "I can't help being a bloody Englishman."

"Who," said Mrs Allegramente, "is oppressing the Irish."

"Ah, hell," Enderby said. He would have said more, but at that moment the son Philip lurched in, probably stoned. He clearly reserved articulacy to his pianoplaying, for what he said, though long and partially structured, made no sense. But his mother understood him, for she said: