The drive out of London on Friday afternoon was as murderous as ever, and it was after six when I finally arrived and staggered down the passage with my case. Serena emerged from a doorway and stood there in welcome, dressed in a shirt and skirt, casual and marvellous. ‘Dump that there. You can go up later. Come and have some tea.’ I followed her into what proved to be the library and a few faces turned to look at me. There were others besides Candida and what I perceived was an already grumpy Andrew, making a great show of being absorbed in Country Life.

One pair, the Jamiesons, I’d met a few times in London and the others, a sporty couple from Norfolk called Hugh and Melissa Purbrick whose life seemed to consist of farming and killing things and not much else, were some sort of connections of an old friend of my mother, so I didn’t anticipate much trouble. ‘Do you want tea? Or a drink to take upstairs?’ said Serena, but I refused both and sat on the sofa next to Candida.

‘I feel very guilty,’ she said. ‘I came back to my answering machine flashing like the Blackpool illuminations. I thought I must have won the Lottery. Either that, or somebody was dead. But they were all from you.’ She had not aged well, certainly nothing like as well as Serena. Her hair was grey and her face was rough and lined and even redder than it used to be, although I would not speculate as to the cause. On the whole, unlike her cousin she looked her age, but her manner was very different from what it had been when I knew her and at first encounter considerably improved. She seemed much calmer, no, not calmer, calm. As the French say, she was bien dans sa peau, and as a result I found myself warming to her in a way that I never really had done when we were young.

‘I’m afraid I was a bit eager. Sorry.’

She shook her head to free us from the need to apologise. ‘I should switch it off when I go away. At least people would know I hadn’t got the message instead of having to deduce it.’

‘What were you doing in Paris?’

‘Oh, just larking about. I’ve got a grand-daughter who’s mad about art and I persuaded her parents to let me take her to see the Musée d’Orsay. Of course, once we were there we spent about three minutes in the museum and the rest of the time shopping.’ She smiled, curious now to get to the bottom of it. ‘So what’s the big thing? Serena said that you were coming as an envoy of the mighty Damian.’

‘In a way. No, I am.’

‘You’re looking up his friends from the old days.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I’m rather flattered to be included. Whom have you seen?’ I told her. ‘Now I’m less flattered. What a peculiar list.’ She pondered the names again. ‘Weren’t they all in Portugal that time?’

‘All except Terry.’

She thought for a moment. ‘Of course, that evening was another story.’ She stretched her eyes silently at me, sharing the memory. ‘Have we ever talked about it?’

‘Not properly. We’ve hardly met since we got back.’

‘No. I suppose that’s right.’ Again she thought over what I’d been telling her. ‘Terry Vitkov…’ she grimaced. ‘I’m quite surprised she was a pal of Damian’s. I thought he had better taste.’

‘Ouch.’ I was amused by this as plenty of people from those days would probably have said something similar of her.

‘Is she the same as ever?’

‘She is the same, if you add the effects of forty years of disappointment. ’

Candida absorbed this for a moment. ‘Do you remember her dance?’

‘No one who was there could forget it without medical intervention.’

She laughed. ‘It was the first time I’d been in the papers since the announcement of my birth. My grandmother wouldn’t speak to me for weeks.’ I considered Candida’s subsequent career of sexual profligacy, illegitimate motherhood and the more recent tragedy of 9/11, and pondered what the grandmother in question would have made of any of that. Presumably death had spared her. Candida was still at Madame Tussaud’s. ‘I know she did it. Whatever she said at the time.’

‘She says not. She says it was Philip Rawnsley-Price.’

‘He might have helped her. He was stupid enough. But she must have known. The choice of brownies for a start. We were all so innocent.’

‘Quite innocent.’ I didn’t bother to defend Terry, although I didn’t think the accusation true. I suppose I didn’t care.

Candida was staring at the fire. By this time I knew the process of what I had to put these people through. I’d arrive and suddenly the woman of the week would be plunged back into a world of four decades ago, which she hadn’t thought about in ages. ‘Golly, we had some funny times that year. Do you remember Dagmar’s dance?

‘Who could forget?’

‘When Damian gatecrashed and had a fight with-’ She put her hand to her mouth. She’d suddenly remembered the identity of Damian’s opponent. Our host shook out the pages of his magazine sharply.

‘I remember it well,’ I said. We shared the moment and tried not to look at the bump on the bridge of Andrew’s nose.

Candida sighed. ‘The main thing I recall is just how young we were. How little we knew of what was coming.’

‘I think we were great,’ I said. Which she took no exception to and smiled. ‘What’s your son doing now?’

‘I have two sons and a daughter, in fact.’ She flashed me a slightly defensive glance. ‘But I know you mean Archie.’ Perhaps sensing I meant her no ill, she relaxed. ‘He’s got his own property company. He’s frightfully rich and successful.’

Not half as rich and successful as he’s going to be, I thought. ‘Is he married?’

‘Absolutely. He’s got a wife called Agnes and two kids, the shopaholic daughter, who’s ten, and a son of six. Funnily enough, Agnes’s mother is a girl you used to hang about with, Minna Bunting. She married a chap called Havelock, who was in the army. Do you remember her?’

‘Very well.’

She pulled a slight face. ‘That’s the thing. I don’t. I never really knew her at the time, but of course now we pretend we were terrific friends and we’ve almost convinced each other it’s true.’

Was it comforting or smothering, this constant interlocking of the old patterns? Revolutions in morality might flare up, Socialism in all its indignant fury might come and go, but still the same faces, the same families, the same relationships, are endlessly repeated. ‘I like the name Agnes,’ I said.

‘So do I. Quite,’ she added, telling me more of what she thought of her daughter-in-law than she intended.

‘Was it very hard with Archie?’

Candida was silent for a moment. She paid me the compliment of not pretending she didn’t know what I was asking. ‘It was easier in a way than it would have been for some. Both my parents were dead and so was my grandmother by then. Just. I hated my stepmother and couldn’t have given a monkey’s tiddly what she thought about anything. I was terribly broke, of course. My stepmother wouldn’t give me a penny and by the end she didn’t have much to give, but at least I didn’t have to feel I was letting everyone down. Actually, Aunt Roo behaved very well, given that she thought I was out of my mind.’

‘But?’

‘Same as the earlier answer. My parents were dead and I hated my stepmother. I had no close family, no backup, beyond Aunt Roo and Serena, and they thought I’d gone mad. So did my friends, to be honest, but they were a little bit more circumspect about showing it.’

‘I know you married in the end.’

‘I did. A chap called Harry Stanforth. Did you ever come across him?’

‘His name seems familiar, since I first heard it, so maybe I did, but if so I can’t remember where. I was terribly sorry to hear what happened.’

‘Yes.’ She gave one of those twitchy smiles of bleak acceptance. ‘It is difficult when nothing’s ever found. I always used to feel for mothers of sons killed in foreign wars, who never got a body back to bury, and now I know just what it’s like. I don’t know why exactly, but you need a proper funeral with something there, something more than a photograph, which is what I had, in order to feel it really is the end.’