I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could manage. ‘I don’t know. I looked at the map and saw I was passing your front door.’

‘But whom do you keep up with?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m in a different crowd now. I’m a writer. I get asked to publishers’ parties and PEN quiz nights and the Bad Sex Awards. My days of making small talk with countesses from Shropshire are done.’

‘Aren’t everyone’s?’

‘I still shoot occasionally. When I’m asked. That’s when some red-faced major comes staggering across the room and says “Weren’t we at school together?” or “Didn’t you come to my sister’s dance?” I never get over it. I’m always shocked into silence that I could belong to the same generation as this boring, bibulous old fart.’ She did not answer, sensing my evasion. ‘I do run into some familiar faces occasionally. I saw Serena at a charity thing not long ago.’

This seemed to confirm an unraised issue. ‘Yes, I thought you might have stayed in touch with Serena.’

‘But I haven’t. Not really.’ She raised an eyebrow quizzically and so, to move things on, I volunteered: ‘As a matter of fact I saw Damian Baxter quite recently. Do you remember him?’

The last question was redundant. She had changed colour. ‘Of course I remember him. I was there, remember.’

I nodded. ‘Of course you were.’

‘Anyway, even without that nobody forgets the Heartbreaker of the Year.’ This time her laugh had a slightly bitter twinge. ‘I gather he’s terribly rich now.’

‘Terribly rich and terribly ill.’

Which sobered her up. ‘I’m sorry. Is he going to be all right?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh.’ This information appeared to put her bitterness back into its cage, and she became more philosophical. ‘It used to make me laugh to think how our mothers steered us away from him. Had they but known at the time, he was almost the only man we ever danced with who could have kept the show on the road. Did he marry?’

‘Yes, but not for long and no one you’d know.’

She absorbed this. ‘I was terribly keen on him.’

I found myself becoming rather irritated by my own apparent ignorance. ‘You wouldn’t have known it,’ I said.

‘That was only because you were starting to hate him by that stage. I’d never have dared tell you. Are you disappointed in me?’

‘A bit. You always pretended to dislike him as much as I did. Even before. Even when he and I were friends.’

She passed easily over my contradiction. ‘Well…’ Her voice had now progressed through philosophical to wistful. ‘It was a long time ago.’ Then, as if ashamed of her momentary retreat, she rallied. ‘I’d have married him if he’d proposed.’

‘What would your mother have said about that?’

‘I wouldn’t have cared what she said. In fact, at one point I thought I was going to have to force him.’ This was accompanied by a little, indignant puff. I looked at her, waiting for an explanation. She smirked. ‘When I started Margaret I wasn’t completely sure whose she was.’ Naturally, this almost made me cry out. Could I have scored a goal with the very first kick? It was with some difficulty that I kept quiet and let her finish her story. ‘I wasn’t really going out with Damian at that stage, but then there was a moment, one afternoon in Estoril.’ She gave an embarrassed giggle. ‘You were all on the terrace and I sneaked off, and…’ I suppose I must have looked disapproving in some way as she gave a little, comic snort. ‘It was the Sixties! Did we use the term “Wild Child”? Had it been invented by then? I can’t remember. Anyway, I suppose I was one. It’s funny, because Margaret is much the straightest of my children. The only one who’s straight at all, really.’

This was a familiar situation to me. ‘Our parents used to talk about the problem child in any family,’ I said. ‘Now, it seems to be more the norm to have one child who isn’t a problem. If you’re lucky.’

Lucy laughed. ‘Well, that’s Margaret in this house. It’s odd, when you think of it, because we had quite a scare with her when she was little.’

‘What sort of scare?’

‘Heart. Which seems so cruel for a child, doesn’t it? She developed something called familial hypercholesterolaemia.’

‘Blimey.’

‘I know. It was about a month before I even learned to say it.’

‘It trips off your tongue now.’

‘You know how it is. At the start you can’t pronounce it and by the end you’re qualified to open a clinic.’ She vanished momentarily into that never quite forgotten, terrible episode in her life. ‘Funny. I can almost laugh about it, but it was unbelievably ghastly at the time. It means you’re making far too much cholesterol, which eventually gives you a heart attack and kills you. Of course, nowadays no sentence is complete without that word but then it was foreign and frightening. And apparently it had always been more or less a hundred per cent fatal. The first doctor who diagnosed it in Margaret, at some hospital in Stoke, thought it still was. So you can imagine what we went through.’

‘What were you doing in Stoke?’

‘I can’t remember now. Oh, I think Philip had an idea of reviving a china factory. It didn’t last long.’ I’d had another glimpse of the tangled odyssey that was Philip’s non-career. ‘Anyway, my mother turned up and scooped us off to a specialist in Harley Street and the news improved.’

‘So it was treatable by the time Margaret had it?’

She nodded, reliving her relief. ‘Completely, thank God. But only just. Literally, it had all changed something like four years before. It took us ages to get over the shock. We were both in the grip of terror for months. I remember getting up one night and finding Philip bending over her cot and crying. We never talk about it now, but whenever I get cross with him I secretly think of that moment and forgive him.’ She hesitated, contradicted inwardly by the Spirit of Honesty. ‘Or I try to,’ she added. I nodded. I could easily see why. The Philip who wept for his innocent child in a darkened nursery sounded not only much nicer but a thousand times more interesting than the ballroom show-off I had known. Lucy was still talking. ‘What we couldn’t understand was that we kept being told it was completely hereditary, but neither of us had any knowledge of its occurring in our families. We questioned our parents and so on, but there was no clue. Still, as I say, Mummy found us a wonderful doctor and once we’d nailed it properly it came right.’ She paused. I would guess she didn’t venture into this territory very often. ‘I always think that Margaret’s passion for normal, ordinary life was probably fostered by that early threat of losing it. Don’t you agree?’

Obviously, this entire speech went straight to the heart of the case that had brought me to Kent, but before I could say another word I was aware of a presence in the door. ‘Hello, stranger.’ The battered, bloated figure of a man who bore only the slightest resemblance to the boy I had known as Philip Rawnsley-Price was standing there. In our salad days Philip had resembled a young and much better-looking, cheeky-chappy actor called Barry Evans, famous then for a film, Round the Mulberry Bush, in which he represented those of us who wanted to be trendy but didn’t quite know how, a large group at any time, which ensured his popularity. Sadly, his stardom didn’t last and the former actor was found dead in the company of an empty whisky bottle at the age of fifty-two, having spent the previous three years driving a taxi in Leicester. I seem to recall there was some pressure on the police to investigate the circumstances of Evans’s death, involving, as they did, cut telephone wires and other peculiar details, which naturally gave his relatives concern, but the police could not be bothered. A decision that might, I imagine, have been different had the unfortunate Mr Evans died at the peak of his fame.

Looking at Philip, framed in the doorway, it was hard not to feel at that moment, that the fate which had engulfed him was almost as bad. He wore ancient, stained cords, scuffed loafers and an open-necked check shirt with a worn, frayed collar. Old clothes were obviously a family uniform. Like me, he had put on weight and his hair was thinning. Unlike me, he had developed the mottled red face of a drinker. More than anything it was the sagging, tired look about those poached-egg eyes, so characteristic of the born privileged who fail, that gave him away. He held out his hand with what he imagined to be a roguish grin. ‘Good to see you, old chap. What brings you to this part of the forest?’ He took hold of my fingers and gave them the ruthless, wince-making squeeze that such men use in a vain attempt to persuade you they are still in charge. Lucy, having waxed so lyrical about him, now seemed put out to be interrupted.