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By Root 397 0

driven me to marry a man more than twice my age; the man with the turquoise-chip earring whom I had seen earlier said they were getting up a game of mah-jongg after dinner and did I play, and if not would I care to learn? The man with the monkey poured some of his gin into a small glass for the creature, saying it would calm his familiar’s nerves. Phillida laughed carelessly at the famous actor’s jokes, acting like a woman ten years younger and two children lighter (and appearing remarkably unconcerned—for a woman who had been chary of upsetting the housekeeper with a mere pair of extraneous house guests—at the house’s present inundation by a considerably larger party of gate-crashers). Sidney held his glass as if it and the house were his own; Marsh, Alistair, and Iris were conspicuous by their absence. I heard at least three versions of Marsh’s shooting, the ill-concealed glee of gossips at their host’s mishap. I accepted the glass that was put into my hand, not knowing if it held arsenic or champagne (and not much caring by that point), and allowed myself to be swatted to and fro by the conversations around me.

“Tristan? Oh, he’s gone off to the Alps to study the chemical effects of prayer.”

“More likely the chemical effects of—”

“Do you have any idea how hard it’s been to bring together decent breeding stock since the War? That poor old bitch of mine is nearly—”

“—recited the whole of Eliot’s Prufrock, standing on the lion’s head in Trafalgar—”

“—Matrimonial Causes Act came just in time for her.”

“Poor old Steed, found Her Ladyship with the gardener right there amongst the orchids, old boy hasn’t been the same ever—”

“Dear Antony, such a lamb, but this nuts-and-berries diet he’s embarked on to cleanse his cells is making him a touch pale.”

“—Serge and the divine Isadora on a stage, in the moonlight . . .”

“We’re not on speakers at the moment, not since he brought that horrible female home and expected me to—”

“—Josephine Baker revue, the most extraordinary—”

“He’d been fine all these years, but he just collapsed, went into his club to read the Daily Mail, and just started sobbing, so they had to take him away and lock him in the attic; so sad.”

“The Daily Mail will have that effect on a man.”

“—want to play a few rounds of mah-jongg?”

“Stan, that damned monkey of yours has done something unspeakable on your jacket.”

“So tiresome, I know. Michael Arlen has the same trouble with—”

“—came a cropper on the hedge near the stream.”

“—Arabia, wasn’t it, Miss Russell?”

The sound of my own name jolted me from my reverie. I blinked and looked into the sparkling, avid eyes of Marsh’s sister. “Arabia,” Phillida repeated. “Where you met Marsh? Terry heard him cursing like the devil after he’d been shot, said my brother had a nice line in Arab gutter invective. And Terry should know.”

I went to sip from my glass, found it empty, found too that it was not the same glass I’d started with. How many drinks had I downed while my mind was wandering through green and quiet fields? I searched for a convenient surface and got rid of the glass, but when I had done so, Phillida was still there.

“It’s a large area, where Arabic’s spoken, isn’t it?” I said. “Although if you know your brother at all, you’d not expect him to settle in a place as unromantic as either Cairo or Damascus.”

“Baghdad!” she pounced. “It was Baghdad, wasn’t it?”

I answered not, just gave her an enigmatic smile that sent her away happy.

Dinner was too hugger-mugger to arrange a convenient, that is, knowledgeable dinner partner whose brains I might pick concerning the ties and habits of the Darlings. Of the men on either side of me, one was walking the edge of drunkenness, had no idea who his host was other than that he thought he might have been introduced to him at the door, and told me plaintively several times that he was only trying to get back to London in time for the final curtain of his girlfriend’s play. The man on my other side was if anything drunker, and proceeded to tell me many apocryphal tales of that thrilling old detecting gentleman