I picked up my suitcase and stumbled forward into a large and light hall. It was a brilliant, sunflower yellow, which seemed at variance with the cloudy scene being played out in it. The paintwork was white and a really lovely portrait of a mother and child by Reynolds hung against the back wall. A tall man, presumably Mr Peter Mainwaring, was standing halfway up the wide staircase. ‘Who is it?’ he shouted.

‘It’s another one of the Buntings’ fucking guests. How many did you tell them? This isn’t a fucking hotel!’

‘Oh, shut up! And show him to his room.’

‘You show him to his fucking room!’ I was beginning to wonder if she had any other adjective at her command.

Throughout this unloving exchange, I may say, I stood there in the centre of the pretty hall quite still, motionless in fact, frozen with nervous terror, like a cigar store Indian. Then I had the bright idea that I should try to act as a soothing agent. ‘I’m sure I can find my own way,’ I said. This might be categorised as a mistake.

She turned on me like a ravening beast. ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid!’ I could see that Billie’s irritation at my arrival was now developing into an active dislike. ‘How can you find your own way when you don’t know the fucking house!’

At this point, and were I older and more confident, I would probably have told her to keep her anger to herself, basically, to employ her own language, to fuck off, and left. But part of youth is somehow to assume blame, to think that every problem must be in some way down to you, and I was no different. I’m sure most of the young of the late 1930s thought the Second World War was their fault. Anyway, as I stood there, blushing and stuttering while our hosts snarled at each other, by some heavenly miracle Terry Vitkov appeared on the landing above Peter Mainwaring and waved to me. I cannot think of a time when I was ever more pleased to see anybody. ‘Terry!’ I shouted, as if I had been in love with her since I was fourteen, and hurried up the stairs, past my angry hostess, past my host, to reach her. ‘I’ll show him where he’s sleeping. It’s next to mine. Right?’ And before they could do much more than nod I had been rescued.

Terry and I became a unit of mutual support through the hours that followed. Apparently the husband, Peter, had bought a house, or a villa, somewhere in France without telling his wife, and Billie had heard the news for the first time about twenty minutes before Terry had got there. She’d come by train, I can’t remember now why I didn’t give her a lift. Maybe I was driving from somewhere else. The point was she arrived about an hour before me. In that time the fight had apparently escalated from quite a slow-burning start, until Billie was standing in the hall, screaming names that would be shocking even today and threatening a divorce that would cost him ‘every fucking [naturally] penny he owned.’ I never completely got to the bottom of quite why his crime was so terrible. I wonder now if there wasn’t someone else involved. Either that, or Billie had made plans for the money that had been subverted by the very act of purchase.

My room was pleasant enough and much as I had come to expect during these sojourns with unknown hosts in the lesser houses of England: The pretty paper, with a faint, pseudo-Victorian pattern, the interlined curtains in not-quite-Colefax, and some flower prints framed in gilt with eau de Nil mounts. I had my own bathroom, which was by no means standard in those days; better still it did not boast too many earwigs and woodlice, and there was a perfectly decent bed. But no amount of comfort could offset the surreal quality of the shouting that continued below, amplified no doubt by the fact that they were once more alone and free to tear out each other’s throats without interruption.

There were two more arrivals. The first was a boy called Sam Hoare, whom I recall better than I might normally have done because he was going to be an actor, a really extraordinary ambition at the time. In my social group, at least, wanting to go on the stage seemed not so much doomed to failure as requiring treatment. He was a tall, good-looking fellow and ended up, I think I’m right in saying, as quite a big wheel in television production, so in a way he was right to persevere, however annoying it was for his parents. The last guest, who was staying in the house and not just coming for dinner, was a nice girl called Carina Fox, whom I always liked without ever knowing especially well. We heard the dogs barking and some talk in the hall and, as Terry had done earlier with me, we sneaked along the gallery to the top of the staircase and rescued them. The Mainwarings transferred the pair into our custody without a backward look. Not for Peter and Billie any worry about whether their guests were tired after the journey and needed some tea. As we know, these incidents are very bonding. The four of us sat in my bedroom, comparing notes and wondering how we were going to get through the evening ahead, until in some way we felt we were all friends, and not at all the semi-strangers we might have been in more normal circumstances.

Dinner started moderately well. They had, after all, had some time to simmer down, and there were two outside, local couples, nearer our hosts in age, who had been invited to join the party, so, after an uneventful glass of champagne in the garden, the ten of us sat down at about a quarter to nine that night and at first made small talk as if none of the earlier episode had taken place. Indeed, I’m sure the newcomers, an army general with a nice wife and a nearby landowning couple, had no idea that their dear friends, Peter and Billie, had been playing out a touring version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf until just before they broke up to have their baths. The dining room was quite handsome, with excellent china and glass on the table and again, surprisingly good pictures. I would guess that Peter came from a family that had lost its estates but held on to a lot of the kit, which was quite common then. Or now, really. But I’m not sure there was limitless money left and I imagine Billie had cooked the food. In ungrand, rectory-type houses, even where the owners belonged to what used to be called the Gentry, there wasn’t nearly as much pulling in of temporary catering staff in the Sixties as there is today and most hostesses felt compelled, perhaps by some lingering war ethic, to do the work themselves. I have said before that the food was seldom much good and would often depend on ghastly magazine-printed receipts, as women then would cut these out and paste them into kitchen scrapbooks, printed especially for the purpose. The cooking done, it was quite normal to ask a couple of local women to come in and help serve it and wash up and so on, which was exactly what had been arranged on this particular night. We’d got through the first course easily enough, the obligatory salmon mousse that appeared in those days on almost every dinner table with taste-numbing regularity. It was followed by some sort of escalope in a glutinous sauce, covered in sprinklings of this and that, and with carrots cut into terrifying rosettes, which again we survived. But before the pudding made its appearance came the first rumblings of trouble. I was about halfway down the table, in my usual, junior position, when I saw the soldier’s wife, Lady Gregson, turn to Sam Hoare who was sitting on her right, as the maid removed her empty plate. ‘Wasn’t that delicious?’ she said, which could hardly be considered contentious.

Sam opened his mouth to agree, but before he could do so his host, on Lady Gregson’s other side, cut in, ‘It was more delicious than it was original, but that’s not saying much.’

‘What?’ Billie Mainwaring’s voice sliced through the atmosphere, silencing most of the rest of us, even those who didn’t know what was going on.

Lady Gregson, who was a nice woman but not an exceptionally clever one, now took the measure of the situation and spoke before Peter could answer. ‘We were just saying how much we enjoyed the last course.’