‘They’re a funny crowd the Irish.’

‘Like the Hungarians. You’ve been too long among the English.’

‘Here! – I am English. So’s my husband.’

‘So was O’Flaherty’s landlady. It’s a small world.’

By that time, it didn’t matter too much what we were saying. I was sensitive to everything about her, her eyes and the way one arm took her weight as she leaned towards me. Discreetly, we fed off a shared excitement.

‘Why don’t we go somewhere private?’ I suggested. ‘Have a drink away from all this racket.’

The Irishman who had offended Rosemary was at the centre of a group just in front of us. The group was laughing at or with him.

‘I’d like that. Shall I bring this?’ She held up her glass of red wine.

‘No problem.’ I reached under the chair and eased out the bottle I’d hidden there earlier. ‘Best wine on the table. I liberated it just after I arrived.’

‘What would happen if everyone did that?’

‘I expect some of them have. Old Scots custom. Necessary foresight of a small nation kept poor by a maniac imperialist next door.’

‘Sad,’ she said mockingly.

‘Don’t cry over my history and I won’t cry over yours.’

We climbed to our feet and stood swaying gently and smiling at one another.

‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘Is your room in the main building?’

‘I don’t have one. I’m a visitor.’

‘Be my guest.’

At the door Primo materialised.

‘You have to stay here.’

She looked at me as if I had grown horns.

‘Who’s he?’

‘Nobody.’ I half turned from her and muttered desperately, ‘Look. We’re going outside . . . you know. We’ll be back. No funny ideas. Brond said it – where would I go?’

He looked at me impassively.

‘Back inside.’

‘What is this?’ She touched my arm. ‘Are you coming or not?’

I shrugged.

‘No – it doesn’t look as though I am.’

‘My God!’ she said. ‘I mean I’ve been stood up but . . . Oh, God!’

To my embarrassment, she looked hurt more than angry. As I shuffled, she gave a shiver and turned back inside. She stood looking at the bright room and then swung round and pushed past us. She vanished into the lengths of the corridor.

‘She thinks you’re my boy friend,’ I said to Primo.

He didn’t react. The idea was too silly to touch him.

‘No, not you,’ I said. ‘Not the Scottish soldier. Jesus! Has nobody told you? There’s no Empire any more and all the Chinks are colonising the restaurants.’

‘I don’t go for that Empire stuff. I’ve seen through all of that,’ he said. ‘But you don’t listen, do you?’

‘Here!’ I shoved the bottle of wine at him. Reflexively, his big hand closed round it. ‘A present. Stick it up your kilt!’

The Irishman was still being the life and soul of the party. Brond was on the edge of the group listening with a little smile.

‘Did you have to spoil my chances?’

‘Chances?’ Tasting the word, Brond found it, like the wine, cheap.

There was so much distraction we exchanged words in a cocoon of privacy.

‘Not for anything you’d understand,’ I complained, sounding petulant.

‘Oh, chances. The girl. Did you try to slip away with her?’

‘Make love not war. Why did you bring me here?’

‘To pass some time. It was too early for where we have to go. Anyway I had been invited and I thought you would enjoy the cultured atmosphere.’

‘Wonderful,’ the girl in front of us said. Like most of the people at the party, she was English by the sound of her. The man who answered was as well.

‘Mm. He tells marvellously funny stories.’

‘Tell us a story,’ the girl called, ‘about your Uncle Danny!’

General laughter.

‘The one about the pig!’

The Irishman grinned vastly. His nose was beaded with sweat.

‘He was known for it in the village,’ he cried. ‘Did I sing you the song about him?’

A rearrangement of the circle left me in front of him. I composed my face into my ethnic interest look – the one that went with visits to folk clubs. As a fellow Celt, I wished him . . . He looked at me and shook his head.

‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘Not with you looking so Scotch and dismal at me.’ The entire crowd smiled and rippled. ‘Like an ould Protestant minister at a funeral.’

In a leprechaun suit and a green hat, he would have made a splendid undoubting Uncle Thomais.

‘Did you ever hear,’ I asked, ‘about the Irishman who blew up the bus? . . . Got his lips all burnt.’

A determined outbreak of small arms talk peppered me away. I refilled a tumbler and found a chair by the wall.

‘A present.’

Brond sat down and put a bottle of wine between us. I recognised it as the one I had thrust on Primo.

‘The condemned man drank a hearty dinner.’ I topped up my glass.

To my surprise I found that some of the consonants had gone rubbery.

‘Don’t overdo it,’ Brond said. ‘We’ll be leaving soon.’

Across the room, I spotted the Hungarian Cockney talking to a man who looked as if he had passed all his exams a long time ago. She had come back then.

‘Suppose I didn’t leave. Suppose I just sat here and finished this bottle and held on to the seat and screamed if you tried to get me to leave.’

‘You know better than that.’

‘No, I don’t.’

I filled my glass which seemed to be emptying by itself. Soon I would have to find another bottle.

‘Suppose— suppose I shouted out loud – right now – that I saw you throwing that boy from the bridge? I mean, right now!’

The words fell out of my mouth sobering me with terror so that I was unable to look at him.

‘I think it was Primo’s boy you killed. I saw you.’

But of course, he knew that. He must have known that from the beginning.

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, and then the second question which, though it shouldn’t have done, mattered more to me: ‘Why didn’t you care that I was there?’ Thinking about that, I rushed on my own destruction. ‘Did the boy overhear something that you couldn’t risk him telling to his father? He was only a child. It must have been something simple enough for him to pass on, but you couldn’t let him tell his father. Simple enough to pass on, even if he didn’t understand it. Or maybe it was a letter you had left lying about? But why would you do that? You’re not careless. Nothing happens unless you want it to happen.’

‘You confuse me with God,’ Brond said, purring. ‘I must say I have a weakness for you. And for Belgian chocolate, of course. And boredom – which is another weakness. I get bored easily.’

‘Do you despise us so much?’

‘I don’t despise a bereaved man enough to torment him with fantasies,’ Brond said sharply. ‘Primo – as you call him – lost his son in a silly stunt on a railway bridge. The boy had been challenged by two friends to cross it on the outside by scrambling across the girders. The two boys saw him fall. A group of spectators, including a police constable, saw him fall. One of the neighbours ran to fetch the father – Primo – and he arrived just as his son fell.’

‘But I saw you,’ I said.

I tried to hold on to that; it had been taken from me once; I tried not to let it happen again.

Brond kept silent until I looked back at him. He was smiling.

‘You saw something or imagine you did in some unnamed place at some time which is indeterminate. And now you’re not sure. How can you be since you did nothing at the time? That must make you wonder about yourself. Suppose now you report this extraordinary event, claim that it happened, and there is no death nor any record of one – But that’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? You must feel like someone in the process of a mental breakdown.’

He shuffled my certainty from me like a conjuror mixing a card into the pack.

‘Stand up!’ he ordered and waited until I did. ‘Let’s settle this nonsense. Take a deep breath. Now, shout out what you imagine you saw!’

The party washed over me as if he had opened a sluice gate. I drowned in that laughter. He was Brond the good friend of Professor Gracemount who had the power to pull strings. I bent and picked up the bottle. My hand held it at the level of his face. It was heavy glass at the level of a face, which was only bone, after all, and flesh. He hung me from the strings of rage and fear, and the little bald Professor came between us ignoring me and took his seat beside him.