‘You’re busy,’ I said. Which didn’t exactly hit the mark I was aiming at.

They had broken apart by now and Serena was straightening herself up. Her body language told so clearly that she was longing to ask both of us, Lucy and me, not to say anything, but of course she felt the request would be demeaning. ‘We won’t say anything,’ I said.

‘I don’t care if you do,’ she replied with immense relief.

Damian, meanwhile, was carrying on with his usual insouciance. ‘I’ll see you later on.’ He gave Serena a swift hug and wiped the lipstick off his mouth with a handkerchief, which he replaced in his pocket. Without a word to us he slipped through the curtain and was gone.

The sound of an O. C. Smith record, which was much in demand that summer, Hickory Holler’s Tramp, suddenly filled the space, making an odd cultural contrast with all those severed heads and murderers and the luckless victim swinging on her hook, but the three of us still stood there. Until there was a noise and the unwelcome face of Andrew Summersby poked round the curtain. ‘There you are,’ he said, ignoring us, ‘I’ve been looking everywhere.’ He took in our grotesque, waxen companion. ‘Ooh er.’ He laughed. ‘Someone’s going to wake up with indigestion.’ And he gave the figure a push, as if she were in a child’s swing. The hideous thing moved slowly back and forth at the end of its rope.

‘Let’s dance,’ said Lucy, and without another word to Serena we left her to the noble dullard, and made our way to a dark little dance floor in the shadow of a guillotine, on to which a French aristocrat in a jacket of cheap-looking wrinkled velveteen, was being strapped by two burly revolutionaries. From a draped alcove to one side the entire Royal Family of France looked on serenely.

‘Are you all right?’ To my bewilderment, Lucy appeared to be on the edge of tears. I couldn’t imagine why.

She was irritated by the enquiry. ‘Of course I am,’ she said sharply, bobbing fiercely in time to the music for a bit. Then she looked up at me apologetically. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘I had some bad news just as I was leaving home and it suddenly came back.’ I looked suitably solicitous. ‘An aunt of mine, my mother’s sister. She’s got cancer.’ This was quite clever of her, I can see now. At the time I am writing of, the English had just about begun to move on from referring to cancer as ‘a long illness bravely borne,’ but there was still something dread in the word, still something, if not exactly shameful, at least to be avoided at all costs. In those days the diagnosis was generally considered a death sentence, and when one heard of people taking treatments one almost despised them for not being able to face the truth, although I suppose logic tells us some of them must have survived, mustn’t they? Anyway, the point is it wasn’t at all like today, when you really do have a reasonable shot, if not quite as reasonable in every case as non-medicos tend to assume. For Lucy to say the word at all was bound to distract me. Still, looking back, I admit I am slightly embarrassed that I completely believed her explanation.

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘But there are all sorts of things they can do now.’ One mouthed these clichés at the time, they were as routine as ‘How do you do?’ but one never thought they contained a grain of truth. She gave a routine nod and we danced on.

For some reason, an innocent one I am certain, Terry or more probably her mother had decided to cut a cake at the peak of the evening. This was not generally done. As I have observed, in those pre-don’t-drink-and-drive days, we ate before we arrived and we did not generally eat again until the breakfast was served towards the end of the dance. There might occasionally be some sort of speech and a toast, although by no means always, at a mid point in the festivities, but this usually consisted of some old uncle just standing and saying what a marvellous girl so-and-so was, and we would all raise our glasses and that was that. There were dangers involved in this departure from the norm, but quite honestly, when there was no speech, which was usually the case, there were times when the proceedings fell a bit flat. We arrived, we drank, we danced, we went home and there had never been what my mother would refer to as ‘A Moment’ in the evening that really registered. The father of the deb in question would have the bitter knowledge that he had paid out thousands upon thousands for a night that no one would remember. On the other hand the danger of a speech and a toast is always that it may in some way feel rather naff. At least, when the occasion is not a wedding or something where speeches are generally expected. Anyway, on this particular evening, perhaps because neither Terry nor Verena was absolutely at ease with the rules, they decided to have cake and a toast, as if it had indeed been the wedding it was not.

I gather people wandering throughout the waxworks were summoned by a kind of tannoy, which would obviously have been installed in that building anyway for crowd control, but by then Lucy and I were back in the Hall of Kings, seated rather wearily at a table with Georgina Waddilove and Richard Tremayne, an unlikely couple if you like, overlooked by some of the duller members of the Hanoverian dynasty, one of whom was responsible for Richard’s predecessor, the first Duke of Trent, in what I suspect must have been an uncharacteristic night of merriment. I have forgotten why Richard was with us, probably because he was tired and couldn’t find anywhere else to sit. At all events Jeff Vitkov, who had come over from New York especially for the ball and was obviously determined to make his mark, took the microphone from the band singer and announced that he was going to propose a toast to his ‘young and beautiful daughter, and her even younger and more beautiful mother.’ This is the kind of thing that makes the English cringe, of course, and we were only just recovering when he added that we were all going to eat some genuine, American brownies, to mark the ‘debut,’ ugh, of a ‘genuine, American girl.’ Quite apart from the toe-curling sentimentality of all this, to most of us in those days ‘Brownies’ meant young Girl Guides, just as ‘Cubs’ meant young Boy Scouts, so there was a certain amount of hilarity released by the announcement that we were going to eat some, but we listened on as Jeff praised his daughter, Terry, who then seized the microphone for herself, paying tearful tribute to her wonderful ‘Pop and Mom,’ which made us freeze even more solidly in our chairs. Taking up a large knife, she sort of slid it through a mound of the brownies in question, and after that a mass of waitresses appeared, carrying decorated trays full of the little sticky brown cakes we now all know so well but didn’t then. I hate chocolate and I remember so did Georgina, so, alone at our table, we didn’t eat any, but they must have been good, because more or less everyone else did, and across the room I could see Damian absolutely piling in.

The events that followed a little while later seemed to start almost as a rumour, a sense of strangeness spreading through the gathering, before anyone was aware of the source. I recall that I was dancing with Minna Bunting, although our little walkout was over by that stage, and there was suddenly the sound of someone being violently sick. Which, then, was very startling. People on the dance floor began to look at each other, as there were more odd sounds, men and women started to scream with laughter, not ordinary amused laughter, but a shrill cackling like a witches’ coven at work. In what seemed like no time at all we could hear shouting and singing and yelling and crying coming from every corner. I looked at my partner to share my puzzlement, but even she didn’t look too clever. ‘I feel incredibly ill,’ she muttered and walked off the floor without another word. I hurried after her, but at the edge she suddenly clutched her head and ran off somewhere, presumably to a distant but welcoming cloakroom. Somehow the dancers themselves had maintained a kind of order, but once we had left them, the crowd filling the rest of the rooms and swirling around us felt slightly – or, before long, very – mad. One of the mothers rushed past me, with her bosom hanging out of her dress and I saw Annabella Warren, Andrew Summersby’s sister, screaming and lying flat out, with her skirt hitched above her midriff, displaying some thoroughly unusual-looking underwear, possibly recycled by her nanny. Not far away a young man in the corner was in the process of pulling his shirt over his head. In the mêlée I had soon lost sight of Minna, but someone caught my arm.