‘Ah, well,’ said Marie-Claude philosophically, ‘it is for the restaurant,’ — and removed her garters.

Rom disliked the Manaus Sports Club and visited it as rarely as possible. Built at the beginning of the rubber boom, it was a colonial-style mansion on the edge of the town which combined all the things he had disliked most in Europe: snobbery, reactionary politics and a leering ‘Oh là là’ attitude to women, who were excluded from virtually all its functions. The heavy red plush furniture was disastrous for the tropics; the food was indifferent. There were even two old gentlemen straight out of a Punch cartoon who sat in the bar reading aloud the obituary columns from the five-week-old Times.

The day after his return from Ombidos, however, Rom drove his Cadillac up the drive to discuss with Harry Parker the dinner for Alvarez in two days’ time. He had never hoped to avoid the occasion; Alvarez, a connoisseur of food and women, was also a connoisseur of plants and had visited Follina. The Minister had particularly asked for his presence and Rom had no intention of snubbing him. He had hoped, however, to be involved as little as possible. Now he had changed his mind.

‘Verney!’ said Harry Parker, coming out to greet him. ‘I heard you’d been away and I don’t mind telling you I was terrified in case you didn’t make it for Saturday! The thing is, we have agreed that someone ought to make a speech in the Minister’s honour, just a short one before the toasts. It must be in Portuguese, of course, and everyone suggested you.’

‘Yes, all right. I’ll do it.’

‘I say, that’s terribly decent of you,’ said Parker, surprised and greatly relieved. ‘Everyone’s coming! De Silva, the Mayor, Count Sternov… I’m putting you on the right of Alvarez with the Mayor opposite. I’ll show you the seating plan.’

They walked together past the tennis courts, the swimming-pool, the new one-storey wooden building which Parker had had built in the grounds to provide acommodation for visitors defeated by the Golden City’s inexplicably ghastly hotels. Rom cared little for Parker’s views, but he had to admit that the young man — brought out from England to run the club on ‘British’ lines — was doing a good job.

‘Actually there’s been a bit of a fuss,’ said Parker. ‘We’ve just heard that Alvarez travels everywhere with his own chef — got a delicate stomach or something. Some high-up French fellow… He intends to bring him here to supervise his own dishes for the banquet. You can imagine how my kitchen staff’s taken it! I hope there won’t be any bloodshed.’

He led Rom through into his office and showed him the plans.

‘That seems all right,’ said Rom. ‘I shall want to speak to Alvarez privately before the dinner. Tell him I want to brush up on his new honours before my speech. Can you clear the smoking-room and give us drinks in there?’

‘Of course. No trouble. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you’re helping us out. You know the fellow, don’t you?’

‘Yes, he’s been out to Follina once. He is a keen gardener.’

‘I’ve laid on a bit of… you know… afterwards,’ said Parker, and over his sharp-featured face there spread a middle-aged leer. ‘A surprise. The old man likes women, I gather?’

‘Yes.’

But if Parker had hoped to be asked more about the ‘surprise’ he was destined to be disappointed. Odd fellow, Verney, the secretary thought. A devil with the women, they said, and certainly that singer two years ago had been the most staggering female he had ever seen. Yet when men stayed behind to tell a certain kind of story or compare notes of their conquests, Verney always seemed to melt away.

‘Come and have a drink, anyway, before you go,’ he suggested.

In the bar Carstairs and Phillips were where they always were: one on either side of an overstuffed sofa, beneath a portrait of King Edward VII at Sandringham despatching grouse. Carstairs’s bald pink pate was bent over the slightly yellowed pages of the five-week-old Times and he was reading out the current crop of deaths to the wheezing Phillips, who sat with one hand cupped round his whiskery ear.

‘Arbuthnot’s gone!’ he yelled across to his friend. ‘Remember him? Andy Arbuthnot. Seventy-three, he was. Pity when they go young like that.’

Phillips shook his wispy head. ‘Don’t remember him. What about Barchester? Peregrine Barchester. Been waiting for him to go these ten years. Always had a dicky heart.’

Carstairs peered at the paper with his bloodshot eyes. ‘No. No Barchester here. Berkely… Bellers… Birt-Chesterfield! That must be the widow — the old man went years ago. Yes, that’s right — Mabel Birt-Chesterfield. Ninety-eight, she was.’

‘She’ll cut up nicely — oh, very nicely.’ Phillips’s head bobbed sagely on its withered stalk.

‘Well, I should hope so; they’ve waited long enough. Always in straits, the Birt-Chesterfields. Someone here’s going to be cremated: Borkmann.’

‘Don’t hold with that. Womanish business, cremation. Still, I daresay he’ll be foreign.’

‘There’s a very young fellow here. Brandon. Henry Brandon. Never heard of him. Only thirty-eight.’

‘Hunting accident, I suppose?’

‘Can’t be. Died in Toulouse. Henry Brandon of Stavely Hall, Suffolk. They don’t hunt in Toulouse, do they?’

‘There was a General Brandon in the Indian Army. My brother knew him. Might be his son, I suppose.’

‘Excuse me, but might I look at your paper for a moment?’

A look of incredulity and outrage spread over the old gentleman’s face. He would have been less shocked if the man had come into his bathroom and asked to look at his wife. As a matter of fact it would have been easier to hand over Florence while she lived. And it wasn’t as though the man was an outsider. He was a well-thought-of chap: Verney, a member of the Club.

‘It’s The Times, you know,’ he said, thinking that Verney had not understood. ‘It’s just come off the boat.’

‘I know. I won’t be a moment. You mentioned a name I thought I knew.’

‘Ah.’ Well, if the fellow had suffered a bereavement that wasn’t quite so bad. He handed over the paper, pointing with his rheumatic finger at the obituary column.

There was silence while Rom looked at the entry.

BRANDON: On May the 3rd, suddenly, at Toulouse, Henry Alexander St John, of Stavely Hall, Suffolk, aged 38. Funeral private. No flowers by request.

‘Friend of yours?’ enquired Carstairs presently.

‘No,’ said Rom and handed back the paper.

La Fille Mal Gardée is a light and charming ballet without the depths of Swan Lake or Giselle. It ends happily: the village girl, Lise, gets her handsome young farmer; the rich and foolish suitor departs in confusion. There are dances with ribbons, harvest frolics and of course the chickens with their échappés.

But there is, in the last act, an extraordinarily moving passage of mime which has become a classic. It occurs when the heroine, shut into her house by her strict mother, lives in imagination — and to the tenderest of melodies — the future that she hopes for with her love.

It was this passage which Simonova was rehearsing while Harriet — who should have been elsewhere — stood in the wings, unable to tear herself away. Almost a week had passed since Verney had stormed away from her at the Casa Branca and the ache of his rejection never quite seemed to go away, but now she forgot herself utterly as she watched… and saw the gaunt, eagle-faced woman turn into a tremulous young girl… saw her put on with reverence her wedding-dress… saw her pick up her first-born and rock it in her arms… count out the other children she would have — and chide them, as they grew, for disobedience.

There were no props and only ancient Irina Petrovna with her cigarette playing the upright piano. Simonova was in a tattered practice dress and hideous bandeau, but it was all there: the glory of married love and its marvellous and celebratory ordinariness.

‘So! What are you doing here? There is no rehearsal for the corps!’

The ballerina, sweeping off, had encountered Harriet.

‘I’m sorry, Madame… only I had to watch,’ said Harriet, rising from her curtsey. ‘You were…’ She shook a wondering head. ‘I shall never forget it. Never! It seemed so simple… there isn’t even really any dancing.’

‘Oh yes, there is dancing,’ said Simonova. ‘Make no mistake! Every finger dances.’ She looked for a moment at Harriet’s rapt face. ‘It is one of the glories of our tradition, that mime. When Karsavina does it, it is impossible not to weep.’

‘Nobody can do it better than you!’

Harriet’s husky-voiced adulation made the ballerina smile. ‘Kchessinskaya taught it to me. Perhaps one day I shall teach it to you, who knows?’ She patted Harriet on the cheek, swept up her accompanist and was gone — but her words sang in Harriet’s head. It meant nothing of course, it was only nonsense; she would never dance Lise. But if just once in my life I could do that mime, thought Harriet — and still in a dream, she moved out on to the empty silent stage.

Thus Rom, coming to find her, stood in the wings and watched as she had watched Simonova. He had put out of his mind this girl who had been Henry’s creature: he would do nothing now except gently break to her the news he had brought, and leave her. Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.

Harriet was humming, trying to remember… After Simonova had stretched out her hand in church for her lover’s ring — had she knelt to pray? No, surely she must have looked up, lifted her face for the bridal kiss. Yes, of course she had. She had pushed back her veil, turned, lifted her head…

So Harriet turned, lifted her head… and saw Verney standing in the shadows.

‘I must speak to you, Harriet.’ His words were curt, his face guarded again. The insane desire to step forward into her dream had passed. ‘We can go to the trustees’ room; there will be no one there.’

He led her through a baize door, along a corridor… up a flight of steps to a richly panelled room dominated by a vast, satinwood table.

‘Sit down.’

She sat obediently, looking very small in one of the twelve carved and high-backed chairs, like a studious pupil facing a board of examiners.

‘What I have to say will upset and sadden you,’ he began and she made a movement of acquiescence. Anything he said while he still looked so angry and bitter would do just that. ‘But I felt you should know while you were out here and had a chance to… forget a little. Henry is dead, Harriet. Henry Brandon. He died a week after you left England.’

Her reaction was worse than anything he could have imagined. The colour drained from her face and she shrank back in the tall chair. She was completely stricken.

‘No… Oh, no, he can’t be! God couldn’t…’

She had really loved him then, that pale deceitful slug of a man, thought Rom, noting with detached surprise the degree of his own wretchedness.

‘I’m afraid it’s true, Harriet. I cabled for confirmation.’

‘He was perfectly all right when I saw him… he was in the maze… he was reading your book,’ she said wildly. ‘He admired you so much.’ Her mouth began to tremble and she bit her lip with a desperate effort at control. ‘How did he die?’ she managed to say. ‘What happened?’

He had decided to tell her only if she asked. ‘He shot himself.’

Her head jerked up. ‘Shot himself? But that’s impossible! How can a little child shoot himself? Did they let him play in the gun-room? Surely even that horrible Mr Grunthorpe wouldn’t have let—’

‘Wait!’ Rom took a steadying breath. At the same time everything suddenly grew lighter — the room, the lowering sky outside. ‘Harriet, I am talking of Henry Brandon, the owner of Stavely — Isobel’s husband. A man of thirty-eight.’

‘A man? Oh, I suppose that’s his father. I never met him. My Henry will be eight in June.’ Her face as she took in what Rom had said became transfigured. ‘It’s all right, then? My Henry is all right?’

‘Yes, I’m sure he is. We’ll cable anyway, but there’s not the slightest reason to assume otherwise.’ He had been standing, needing to be distanced from her grief. Now he pulled out a chair in order to sit beside her. ‘I didn’t know there was a child,’ he said slowly. ‘I took good care to know nothing about what went on at Stavely.’ He stared for a while at the swirling clouds outside, massing for the afternoon downpour. Then: ‘When you talked of meeting Henry… of loving him… it was of my brother that I thought you spoke. Of the man who has just died.’