A ROYAL PARTY

Jack Turner pedals his bicycle towards the first scarlet fissures of morning, the breeze he creates threatening to displace his cap. He enjoys the rush of air about his neck and through his hair. He does not slow. His booted feet impel the pedals, but with very little effort. He is carried along, body upright, by the momentum of his journey’s beginning, black wheel spokes spinning into a blur beneath him. Now and then, he releases the handlebars and stretches his arms into wings. He flies towards hours of hard physical labour, smiling at the few people he passes. He is, as usual, happy.

When he approaches a corner, he grips the handlebars and leans far left or right, testing the forces which hold him up. In the last weeks, he has learned to anticipate the buildings he will see as he speeds from one street to the next: the sprawling, ornately arched, red-bricked structures; the rows of skinny, pale-stoned homes; the white-columned entrances to grand private dwellings; the crammed, two-storey houses from whose slate roofs tiny triangular windows protrude like pairs of peeping eyes. Occasionally, he still views these familiar sights. Occasionally, his attention is drawn by some changeable detail – a tabby cat curled on a sill, mewing its presence against the glass; a bicycle like his own propped against painted railings; a young girl breathing steam onto a window then drawing faces in it with an index finger and a grin. But more often now, he watches the sky, because that he cannot predict. And today, it shows him a collection of radiant red cracks.

Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.

Jack recites the adage in his mind, but he does not believe in it. He has seen fine days unwind out of similar burning dawns, the good sneaking gradually out from behind the bad.

He pedals on, the metal wheel guard rattling, the spokes ticking, the wind hissing past him. Riding under lines of plane trees, he inhales the faint sweet scent of pollen on this first summery day of the year. He thinks past the next damp hours, when the harsh smell of fish will stick in his nose and to his skin, and fancies himself already back at Bayswater Road, washed and enveloped in clean bed sheets. He thinks of going home.

Or so Henry imagines. Because that is what Ruby would have done, in the same situation. Ruby would have appreciated every last detail.

Henry stands and steps towards the window. He holds Libby against his chest, his arm hooked underneath her so that she can kick her legs freely, as she loves to: they drum into his stomach. He stops in the curve of the bay, where Ruby used to sit to smell the rain, and bounces Libby up and down, humming an invented tune. The downpours and showers of the past two weeks have been whipped away and the street below Henry’s flat is busy with cars and walkers: people who have apparently hidden away through the long, colourless days. The city sounds of footsteps and chatter, car horns and bicycle bells, slamming doors and clattering cart wheels and the squeal and clank of trams. Small sounds, through the glass. The buses, though, announce themselves loudly, and Henry closes his eyes until they have grumbled out of sight.

‘Who’s there?’ he asks Libby. ‘Who’s there, hmm? Is Jack coming?’

And when she squawks happily in response, Henry’s stomach plummets, as though Libby’s heel has made a footballer’s connection and sent it whizzing to the floor. His daughter knows more of Jack than the woman who carried her, grew her. Or perhaps not. He will never know, really, but he fears it.

He turns her to face him, her little body pliable between his palms.

‘What do you know, ay?’ he says. ‘Tell your father.’

Libby smiles at him and he lifts her higher, above his head.

‘Yes, tell your father,’ he demands, wiggling her so that she laughs. And she does. She laughs and laughs, as though Henry has told a joke of timeless brilliance. Her nose scrunches up. She begins to hiccup. Her joy draws tears from Henry, and he tries and fails to blink them away, then laughs at himself as they wet his face.

‘You’re making a fool of me, Miss Twist,’ he tells her. He throws her just free of his hands and catches her again, watching her face change as she finds herself loose in the air. Each time, she registers the same shock, opening her eyes and her mouth wide, then giggles as she finds the safety of her father’s hands. It amazes Henry, that there is a human being on the planet who requires only the touch of his hands to feel safe.

He wonders how old his daughter will be when she realises that he is simply a man.

The scent of Johnson’s baby powder fills the shadowy flat as Henry and Libby play their catching game. Following Viv’s instructions, Henry had bought three gold cans of the powder. The orange and cream labels are arranged neatly now on the shelf above her cot – he hasn’t yet emptied the first can, and that reassures him a little. He has had to begin calculating how much these things will cost. Soon, his savings will run out.

‘I could beg for my job back,’ he mutters. ‘Yeoman would help.’ He presses Libby to his chest and turns to Ruby. ‘I don’t think it’s good for her, though, being away from us all the time.’

He speaks the thought as if in conversation, but he does not converse with Ruby’s ghost. He does not guess at the words she might have said. He only remembers those she did, in whichever order they happen to come to him, and today, though it does not help him with his impending decisions, what he remembers is Ruby reclining on the settee the night after their wedding. She wore a two-piece tweed suit and, over it, tiredness. She twisted her bare feet around and around themselves.

‘Do you think we know each other very well, Henry?’

‘I’ve seen you naked,’ Henry answered, grinning.

She smirked then stuck out her tongue. ‘It’s not about seeing me naked,’ she said. ‘It’s about knowing me naked.’

‘And I do. I know the bones of you.’

‘Do you promise?’

Henry finished undressing and climbed into bed. ‘I promise,’ he said. ‘I know how happy you are when you dance, and that you miss your sister more when it rains. And I know that you’re braver with your body than you are with your feelings. And that you talk too much when you’re scared.’ He flicked the bed sheets aside for her to get in. ‘What I haven’t worked out yet is what you’re scared of right now.’

‘You, of course,’ she replied, standing so that she didn’t have to meet his eye as she spoke. ‘Isn’t that obvious?’

‘Me? What would I ever do to hurt you?’

‘Henry.’ Removing only her jacket, she curled into their bed and put her cheek to the breadth of his chest. She sighed her answer. ‘You could leave me.’

He sits down on the empty settee. The fire is black and long dead and he pokes a toe at an escaped nugget of coal. Rising morning sunlight slants slowly across his back and he shifts so that Libby can feel its heat on her face. She flutters her eyelids against it. Henry rests his chin on top of her soft, fusing skull. Here she is – Elizabeth Ruby Twist: a complete, living, thriving, laughing person. A person Ruby will never meet.

‘It was you,’ Henry whispers to the photograph above the fireplace. ‘You left me. You left me.’

But still the idea is not one he can credit. Ruby wouldn’t have allowed it. Ruby would have fought, harder than she’d ever fought for anything. And that is why he believes – though he would have sniggered and dismissed the concept in anyone else – that she has deposited some fraction of herself in Jack.

Henry’s certainty makes him suddenly desperate for Jack, and he goes back to the window to watch the street whilst he waits. To be desperate for a man – it is at once incomprehensible and entirely ordinary, because he knows, he knows, he knows that there is something of her in there, and he will not let it go.

But perhaps, he thinks, he could consult a medium, someone who deals in these matters, to help him explain it all to Jack. The only theory he can muddle together is that Ruby and Jack died at the exact same moment and that, in striving to return to her body, she found herself in the wrong place. He cannot broach the subject with theories and possibilities, though. He needs definites. He needs someone to tell him, with a smile and a certain nod of their head, that people can come back; and that when they do, they might be slightly different; and that, though their knowledge of the past might be confused, it could reorder itself, given time.

It is what he needs to believe. And he needs Jack to believe it, too.

He could not endure being left behind again.

At eight o’clock, short minutes after deep navy darkness has slithered over London, Henry takes Libby upstairs to Vivian for the night, and he and Jack leave for Monty’s. City lights spark on and shut off, imitating the stars, and as they walk Henry grows quieter. As if in response, Jack grows chattier.

‘So, what are the rules here? I mean, this is all a bit daring, isn’t it? A week ago we couldn’t even go to the pictures, and … How many people are going to be there, anyway? Henry?’

‘I told them I had a friend staying,’ Henry answers. ‘They’re expecting you.’

‘But what if someone works it out? Works us out?’

Henry stops and leans in closer to whisper to Jack. ‘I thought you didn’t care if you were called a nancy.’ He smiles shyly. ‘You are that you are, Jack. You are –’

‘I don’t care,’ Jack protests. ‘It’s just …’

‘What?’

‘Elizabeth,’ he says. ‘What about Elizabeth?’

Henry takes his hands from his pockets and, removing his hat temporarily, pushes them, left then right, over his slicked hair. ‘Ida is happy that she’s happy,’ he answers. ‘Nobody could justify taking a child from her father when the family is content with the arrangement. I’ve thought about it. And Ida gave me her word she would speak for me, if she needed to. I’m not half so worried about Libby as I was.’

‘That would all change, Henry, you know that. If Ida, or her parents … If they knew –’

‘They’re not going to find out because we arrived at a single party together.’

‘You can’t be –’

‘I am. I’m sure. In any case, we’re just two chaps attending a party. Nothing more, nothing less. Not to anyone else’s eyes.’

‘I think we might be a bit ignorant to believe that,’ Jack mutters.

And they might. Henry agrees. But he feels bolder when Jack is standing next to him. He feels braver. Jack fiddles with the lapel of his jacket. He has borrowed one of Henry’s suits, black, and wears the waistcoat buttoned and the jacket loose – as Henry does, though he wears grey. Each man has on a fedora to match his suit, the front of the brim snapped down. Each has his tie smartly knotted. Neither looks very much like a king, but then neither has the money or the inclination to play dress-up. They want only to enjoy a night out together. They have not considered that, handsome as they are in their sharp ensembles, they will be kept apart most of the night by various women dressed as various queens.

Henry swings open Monty’s gate and steps inside first. Though they do not touch, he can feel Jack close at his back, fidgeting with his clothes. Henry, too, is beginning to panic, but he is soon calmed by the sight of the garden, which has again been transformed and does not bear the least resemblance to the place he visited after the funeral.

Fairy lamps, strung from the trees and along the walls, cast a rich glow around the oblong of land. At the far end of the garden, as distant as possible from the trees, a long, honey-coloured, double-peaked tent has been erected. Clearly visible within it is a heaped banquet table and, where there is space, circular gatherings of cushioned chairs. In the middle of the garden, on top of a mahogany table with delicately sculpted legs, is a large, blaring gramophone, its gold nonagonal horn glinting. And around that central point, couples spin hip to hip, necks stretched long as swans, the Charleston and the black bottom abandoned tonight in favour of a waltz they have deemed more regal. Men in doublets and breeches and women in corsets and petticoat-puffed skirts slot themselves seamlessly into the triple-time music, a few nips of this or that no doubt aiding their grace.

‘Do you remember how to dance?’ Henry asks.

‘No,’ Jack answers, ‘but I’m going to enjoy learning.’ He winks and claps Henry on the shoulder, and Henry tenses a tad, though he thinks he hides it well enough: he disguises it as an adjustment of his jacket.

‘Go and find a partner,’ Henry suggests.

‘Really?’

‘Really,’ Henry says, because he can see Matilda approaching now, and fear has seized him. He does not want to introduce Jack to her. Or anyone else, for that matter. Jack feels like his very own secret, like a thought or a dream that might spontaneously fragment should his friends lay eyes on it.

And so, in his peripheral vision, Henry remains aware of Jack – a long, wiry figure, walking away to find a drink and a willing dance teacher – but the person he watches is Matilda, who is strutting quickly towards him, her pace made more maniacal by the orchestral beat issuing from the gramophone. As the insistent piano part is joined by trilling violins, a viola, a more solemn cello, flutes, a smooth oboe and finally a majestic French horn, Matilda weaves through the spinning couples, shoving at those people who swing too close, her face pinched and pale. Henry is sure she will say something nasty about Gray when she reaches him, and he doesn’t want to hear it. Grayson is a good friend; a good husband, too, as far as Henry knows. He is hardly ever responsible for the bouts of belligerence which sometimes grip his wife.

‘Which Queen are you?’ Henry asks, smiling, once she is within earshot.

Matilda stops at his side, resisting, as always, the urge to touch him. The need makes her jittery. ‘A generic one,’ she answers, swallowing the ‘darling’ she usually addresses him with. Her anger has not dissipated yet. Already, though, standing beside Henry, she can feel it shrinking, cowering, pulling in on itself like a hiding animal. It is as if she is eighteen again, and so ready to be in love that she can feel it even before she has found the man.

‘Where did the crown come from?’ Henry asks, nodding at it.

‘It’s a tiara.’

Although she is corseted, Matilda wears a narrower dress than many of the party guests. It is of some light, nameless colour, overlaid with lace, and is only just grand enough for the tiara styled into her hair.

‘The tiara, then.’

‘Monty.’

‘Is it real?’

Matilda sighs loudly. She stares at the dancers rather than share a look with Henry. ‘I don’t know, Henry. I think it might just be … I see you brought your friend.’

Jack is walking slowly around the garden’s boundary, smiling as he goes. Where he finds climbing vines or the trunk of a tree, he drags his fingers over them, enjoying the different sensations. When women catch sight of him – and many of them do, Henry notices – he nods and grins, then moves off before they have a chance to approach. As Henry and Matilda watch, he stops and leans back against the wall: one hand in his pocket, he taps the other against his leg with the music.

‘How did you know it was him?’ Henry asks.

‘I saw you arrive,’ Matilda says. She did: the explanation is in part truthful. The memory of he and Henry together, though, churns inside her.

‘Jack Turner,’ Henry says.

‘Where did you meet?’ Matilda asks, taking a drag of her cigarette. Determined to wear the look well, she had practised before a mirror prior to smoking in public. She had measured each movement precisely, adjusting her hand or wrist or elbow by the smallest fractions until she had it right. Now, she releases her coil of smoke and positions her arm like a ballet dancer, unrolling from the wrist until her cigarette holder points diagonally away from her and traps the reflection of the fairy lamps in its fiery design.

Henry does not comment on this. He does not seem to notice the change.

‘Nowhere. We just … We’ve always known each other, in a way.’

‘Old friends,’ Matilda says.

‘Yes.’

‘Jack Turner?’

‘Yes,’ Henry answers.

‘Jack Turner,’ she breathes, releasing another smoky spiral. ‘And Henry Twist.’

They dance and drink and flirt and fondle past midnight. Then past one o’clock, two o’clock. Finally, at somewhere around three, someone flops to the floor, and after that rather than dance the guests simply mill from group to group, seeking people to slink away into darkened corners of London with. Henry and Jack have removed some chairs from the tent and they sit in front of it now, Monty to their right, and Matilda and a late-in-arriving Grayson to their left. None of Henry’s fears have yet transpired. In fact, Jack is getting along well with the men. Matilda, however, has been in a filthy mood all evening, her silences interrupted almost solely by exaggerated huffs and sighs.

Henry has not enquired as to why. He has no sympathy, and even less patience, with her behaviour. Ruby was the sort of woman who voiced her complaints, stridently. And he appreciates that more than ever now: it gives him one more thing to remember.

Tonight, what he recalls is their very first argument, on the pavement opposite Daisy’s Strawberry Hill flat. Him grinding his teeth and hissing at her to be quiet. Ruby shouting, her accent thickened by frustration, because he had messed up and their wedding-day plans would have to be changed. Daisy opening a window, leaning out and warning them, in her most sarcastic voice, that hers was ‘a respectable position, where the streets were quiet and the bedrooms were reserved for argumentations’.

‘And what are you smirking about, Twist?’ Monty asks.

Henry shakes his head. ‘Nothing.’

‘In that case,’ Monty winks, ‘I’m sure we didn’t want to know anyway.’

‘Don’t be such a dirty old man, Monty,’ Grayson laughs.

‘Oh, come on, who would fill the role if I didn’t?’

‘Nobody. That’s the preferable option.’

‘Nonsense.’ Monty swigs the last of his drink away and throws the glass over his shoulder. It lands five or six feet behind him and rolls to a stop, depositing a glistening trail of clear liquid. ‘It’s what everyone’s here for.’

And, as if conjured by his words, a couple of girls appear from inside the tent, throwing obvious looks at Henry and Jack.

‘Come,’ Monty calls, beckoning them. ‘Come and sit, Your Highnesses. You are most welcome at our humble court.’ He stands and bows to kiss their hands, which they offer, slow and deliberate. Soon, the two are sprawled on the grass, laughing at Monty’s bad jokes and glancing from Henry and Jack to each other and back again in a flirtatious routine so complicated that Henry thinks they must have choreographed it while they layered up their costumes. They introduce themselves as Muriel and Lillian – names which pass through Henry’s consciousness without being retained. At one time, before Ruby, he would have allowed them to seduce him. Now, however, he is incapable of anything but worrying that one of them might interest Jack.

‘And what is it you do, Muriel?’ Monty is prompting, but Henry is not listening. His head is boiling and his throat is tightening and his stomach is hollowing itself out because Muriel is lovely, and his brain is refusing to show him anything much beyond Jack clambering on top of her in Henry’s own bed.

‘You’ve gone quiet, Twist,’ Grayson observes a few minutes later.

‘He’s a shy fellow, our Henry,’ Monty puts in. ‘But he’s handsome enough to make up for it, don’t you think, ladies?’

They giggle in reply.

‘That handsome!’ Jack teases, twirling his glass between his palms and bending forward to rest his arms on his knees. ‘You must think him very handsome indeed, Monty.’

Henry feels the blush climbing his body and, whilst he wills it to fade, he cannot take control of it, because he is thinking now of the way Jack’s lean shoulders look under his jacket, reaching forward like that, and the gently indented column of his spine, and the slight dimples at the base of his back. They are still accompanied by a trace of disbelief, these thoughts. But he cannot dwell on that trace, cannot justify it by labelling himself a nancy. He refuses to. He craves Jack – that much is undeniable. So he leaves it at that.

‘I’m probably not the best judge, I’ll grant you,’ Monty laughs. ‘But these lovely ladies seem to agree with me.’

‘You’re actually making him colour,’ Grayson says.

‘Am I?’

‘No,’ Henry protests. ‘You’re not, no.’

And the claim would have marked the end of the teasing, he suspects, had Matilda not chosen this exact moment to stand and make some announcement.

She moves abruptly, knocking her chair backwards onto the grass in the process. It lands with a dull thud. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she almost-shouts, ‘are you all truly this stupid?’ A few nearby guests squint at her before returning to their conversations, their questions apparent in their shrugged shoulders, their furrowed brows.

Grayson stands with her, raising his hands as though to calm a spooked horse. ‘Tilda?’

‘No,’ she snaps. ‘No. You can sit back down. Go on, sit back down.’

Grayson obeys and Matilda stalks back and forth, rubbing her black eye make-up down her cheeks. She wobbles momentarily, her heel sticking in the earth and serving only to make her angrier. Her shoulders are high, prickling.

She’s going to say it. How she found out, Henry doesn’t know, but she is going to say it, he can feel it, and it’s like the dark before a big push again, and dread is spreading through him like fire: that same unstoppable lick and burn. Waiting into those nights, Bingley always at his side, Henry would retreat further and further into himself. He’d close himself off to the sounds of the other men, passing cigarette stubs from mouth to mouth, passing crumpled photographs from hand to hand, passing insults about in an attempt to block out what was coming with the morning. He’d wash, if he could, and ready his boots with the same caring touch with which a mother would tend a newborn. Then he’d lie down, and close his eyes, and fight the loosening in his bowels.

‘How is it you’re so calm?’ Bingley had asked him one time. The night was oven-hot; bugs of some description stuck on the air and to the men’s skin, and no matter how fast they were swatted away, each one managed to leave that itchy bump behind them – the swelling red evidence of the fact that soon Henry and Bingley and every other soldier on the continent might be nothing more than rotting flesh, ripe for insect consumption.

‘I’m not calm,’ Henry replied, opening his eyes and sitting up again, his routine fatally disturbed.

‘You do a bloody good impression of it.’

‘What else is there?’

Bingley considered this, chewing at the sharp edge of a cracked fingernail. ‘There’s talking the thoughts away.’ The approach Bingley clearly wanted.

‘Talk, then,’ Henry conceded. He had not known then, of course, what would happen to Bingley the next day, but he was glad in the end to at least have given the boy what he wanted.

‘What about?’ Bingley asked.

‘Tell me about your family,’ Henry answered. Earlier on in the campaign, there would have been jeering at this sort of talk. Men would have cuffed boys about the ears and called them sissies. Boys would have blushed then got their dicks out, to hide their shame. But all that was over with. The few men nearest to Henry and Bingley moved closer to listen, each of them painfully jealous of their own simple pasts.

‘At home,’ he began, leaning back and locking his hands behind his head, ‘I’m apprenticed to a carpenter. And we live in this tiny terraced house – on Hawthorn Road, that’s what my road’s called – my parents and my three little sisters and me. Fifteen, eleven and nine they are, my sisters, and every morning we have breakfast together, all six of us, and we scream at each other most of the time. Really scream, you know? Because someone has eaten the last slice of bread, or there’s no milk left.’ Bingley laughed as he said this, the laughter catching wet in his throat. ‘Or because it’s early and we just want to scream because another day is starting in a way we might not want it to. Selfish things like that. But we like each other best when we scream, I think. Or we will when I get home. ’Cause I’d fight for those girls, you know. I’d bloody fight for them. For all I’m worth.’

Henry had wished then that he’d had someone to fight for. He’d wished hard for that. And now he has Jack, right here with him, to fight for. But he doesn’t know how. He’s too angry. He’s too scared.

‘Can’t you see it?’ Matilda fumes. ‘Can’t any of you see it? You two especially –’ With a jabbing finger, she indicates Muriel and Lillian, who gape blankly back at her. ‘You’re embarrassing yourselves. Really, you are. Would you like me to explain why that is?’ She whirls around and points first at Jack then at Henry. She times her revelation perfectly. ‘He’s his man,’ she declares finally. ‘His man. Do I need to carry on? Do I? Do I? Do I?’

She repeats the challenge until somebody stops her.

‘You do not,’ Monty says quietly, his face stern. ‘You do not and you should not.’ Then he too stands and, placing a careful hand to her back, says, ‘You’ll regret this tomorrow, Tilda.’

In the few short moments that follow, Henry observes them from what feels like a great distance: Monty steering Matilda back to her chair and setting it right for her; Matilda lowering herself onto it mechanically, as though the part of her brain which moves her has ceased functioning; Grayson sneaking away to retrieve fresh drinks rather than admonishing or questioning Matilda. Henry imagines again that he is the man behind the projector at the cinema, and that the people before him are just tricks of light which he alone has the power to turn on or switch off. He brightens their colours in his mind, only to fade them to nothing. He tries to recollect every last detail he described to Jack – the first words on the screen, the crackling sound of the reel – so that he can replay them for himself, in slow methodical order, because it might be the only way to keep hold of his control.

Jack does not move. Henry does not move.

Henry wants to hurt Matilda.

One of the girls on the ground speaks: perhaps to ease her own discomfort, perhaps to ease everyone else’s. Either way, she chooses the right words. ‘My cousin Wally has a similar set-up himself. He keeps it quiet for the most part. His buddies have never seemed to mind, though, you know. You two shouldn’t be so coy.’

There is a wallop of silence before Monty starts to laugh.

‘But … It’s not true!’ Grayson says, handing out glasses and settling back into his chair.

Were he not rattled, though, he would offer the place to one of the ladies – Henry is positive of that much. Grayson is a gent. Henry peeks at Jack from under his hat brim. Jack shrugs in response, lips twitching into a flash-fast smile, there and gone again. Henry removes his hat, to give himself something to handle. Then, finally, he speaks.

‘Actually …’ he says.

And that’s all he needs to say. Matilda rolls her eyes and slumps backwards, vindicated but somehow all the more empty for it. Grayson opens his mouth and closes it, like a child blowing bubbles. Monty reaches out and clamps a hand around Jack’s knee – Jack being nearest to him – and as he does, the two queens excuse themselves and amble away in search of more suitable men.

‘Well, I can’t say I was expecting that,’ Monty says, the words coming slowly. ‘But, there we are. It would be a tiresome existence indeed if we were all of us predictable.’

‘Is that all you’re going to say?’ Matilda asks, her voice like flint. She does not turn to Monty for his answer.

‘Perhaps,’ he suggests, ‘you should head home, Tilda. Why not come back in the morning? I’ll be here, supervising the clean-up after this mob. I could do with your help.’ He speaks as though to a child, all the while eyeing Gray, who eventually takes the hint and hooks his arm under Matilda’s to persuade her up.

And, much to Henry’s surprise, she leaves without uttering another sound.

Henry, Jack, and Monty sit in silence then, gazing after the Stecks as they meander away through the constellations of crownless monarchs who lie about the garden, wide skirts and velvet cloaks spread over the grass, legs flung out, cigars and cigarettes releasing matching smoky wisps into the sky as they curl, the Bright Young People the newspapers so passionately love and so readily hate, body into body. Their wedding vows are forgotten. Their homes and their children and their everydays are a far-off joke. They are shaping a ruleless reality, but Henry knows that he and Jack do not belong within it.

This is it for them. Tonight must be freedom enough.

He glances in Matilda and Gray’s direction only twice, to make sure they really are leaving. Before they have even crossed the garden, Henry notices, Gray releases his wife’s arm. By the time they reach the gate, they are walking two or three feet apart, and when they step through it onto the pavement beyond, they move like two strangers, happening into each other’s lives for only the briefest of moments.

And that, Henry thinks, is sad. That, regardless of the situation, is very sad indeed.

Later, someone tires of the lethargy which has pervaded the party and drops the gramophone needle to restart the music. As couples redistribute themselves around the garden – dancing more desperately now, less discreetly – Monty takes Henry aside and sits him in a quiet corner. Backside to the earth, Henry pushes his shoulders hard against the uneven stone-work: hard enough to leave little dents in his flesh.

‘Have you thought about this, properly?’ Monty asks.

‘I’ve done enough thinking, Monty.’

‘And you’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why is it,’ Monty probes, ‘that you’re facing away from me?’

Henry turns to Monty, to tell him that he is not ashamed; that he had not been avoiding Monty’s regard; that he had been watching Jack, who, visible transiently through the shifting gaps between revolving couples, is trying presently to balance three champagne flutes on his fingertips. But he stops himself. Monty has caught him unawares: the man has never looked so old. Henry studies the patches of discolouration which map the whites of his eyes, the pleats of skin folding down over his lashes. He wonders if he, too, has aged tonight.

‘Will he make you happy?’

‘Why do you care about us so much?’ Henry returns. ‘We’re selfish, every last one of us. Selfish and callous. And we don’t do a thing for you. Not a single damn thing –’

‘Yes, you do. You …’ Henry hears the wobble in Monty’s voice and locks eyes with him, challenging him for once to speak the truth. He can’t tolerate another secret. ‘You make enough noise to drown out the fear.’

‘Of what?’

‘The end, of course,’ Monty answers. ‘What else?’

Henry stops. He can’t respond to that. Not when he has ventured so close to the end himself. He understands Monty’s fear, he does, but …

‘Now tell me if he’ll make you happy. Henry.’

And Henry is about to say ‘yes, yes, yes’, but before he can utter a sound, a shriek goes up. Short but penetrative, its echo seems to knit itself into the air, where it lingers, another high-ceilinged tent, as panic begins below. One of the fairy lamps, knocked by an enthusiastic dancer, has swung too close to the greenery and as flames begin to spread, and women scatter away gripping their skirts, and men dash forward to make half-hearted attempts at dousing the growing fire, so Monty – young again – leaps up and lopes away across the garden.

Yes – that is the answer Henry had wanted to give. Yes. And for a moment, it had felt definite. As Monty rushes away, though, Henry loses his grasp on the word and, when Jack finally returns to his side, smiling, champagne flutes now artfully arranged in his slim hands, Henry’s bravery seeps away too. There will be no celebration for them. How can there be?

He jumps up. He tries, and fails, to speak. And then all at once he is running. Hat tumbling to the ground, tie flapping over his shoulder, he attempts to escape the party – the whole evening, in fact – at a sudden, unstoppable sprint.

Shoved aside, Jack lets the glasses smash to the ground. Then, retrieving Henry’s hat, he takes one long deep breath and sets off after him.