It was, as Sophy said, an exquisite snack: delicate little sandwiches of smoked salmon and caviar, Roman and Neopolitan pastries, fruit and a chilled white wine. There was also, surprisingly, whisky and soda. And tea for anybody who preferred it as Sophy herself did, iced with lemon, and very fragrant.

“What a rum little lot we are,” she thought indulgently. A light breath of air brought a stronger whiff of myrtle and pine needles with it and momentarily lifted her hair from her forehead. She found that Grant looked fixedly at her and she said hurriedly: “We none of us seem to be worrying about poor Mr. Mailer, do we?”

He made a sharp movement of his hands. “No doubt our authoritative friend has coped,” he said.

Major Sweet, having eaten very heartily and made smart work of two whiskies-and-soda, appeared to be in a mollified condition. He said: “Most extraordinary chap. My opinion,” but lazily and without rancour. “ ’Strordinary good tea,” he added.

“I think,” Lady Braceley said, “we’re all getting along very nicely as we are — with Giovanni,” and gave Giovanni a sufficiently lingering glance. “Although,” she said, “it’s a pity that other gorgeous brute’s deserted us.”

“What exactly,” Kenneth asked restlessly, “is the programme for tonight? Cars at nine — for where? Where do we dine?”

“At the Giaconda, sir,” Giovanni said.

“Good God!” the Major ejaculated. As well he might. The Giaconda is the most exclusive as it is undoubtedly the most expensive restaurant in Rome.

“Really?” Lady Braceley said. “Then I must take up my quarrel with Marco. We had a row about tables last week. He turfed out a Mexican attaché or somebody thought to be rather grand, and gave his table to me. There was almost an international incident. I told him I hated that sort of thing. Actually it was too naughty of him.”

“This time,” Kenneth said, “darling Auntie, you’ll find yourself with a set dinner at a back table near the service door. If I know anything about escorted tours.”

“Excuse me, but no, sir,” Giovanni said. “This is not such an arrangement. The service is in all ways as for the best. You will order, if you please, what you wish.”

“And pay for it?” Kenneth asked rudely.

“On the contrary, sir, no. I will attend to the settlement.” He turned to Grant. “When you are ready to leave, sir,” he said, “will you please ask your waiter to send for me? I will make the tipping also but of course if any of you is inclined—” he made an eloquent gesture. “But it will not be necessary,” he said.

“Well!” the Major ejaculated. “I must say this is — ah — it seems — ah—” he boggled slightly, “quite in order,” he said. “What?”

The Van der Veghels eagerly concurred. “At first,” the Baron confided to Sophy, “my wife and I thought perhaps the charge was too much — a ridiculous amount — but Mr. Mailer impressed us so greatly and then,” he gaily bowed to Grant, “there was the unique opportunity to meet the creator of Simon. We were captured! And now, see, how nicely it develops, isn’t it, providing all is well with the excellent Mailer.”

“Ah, pooh, ah pooh, ah pooh!” cried the Baroness rather as if she invoked some omnipotent Chinese.

“He will be very well, he will be up and bobbing. There will be some easy explaining and all laughing and jolly. We should not allow our pleasures to be dim by this. Not at all.”

“I must tell you,” the Baron waggishly said to Grant, “that I have a professional as well as an aesthetic pleasure in meeting Mr. Barnaby Grant. I am in the publishing trade, Mr. Grant. Ah-ha, ah-ha!”

“Ah-ha, ah-ha!” confirmed the Baroness.

“Really?” Grant said, politely whipping up interest. “Are you indeed!”

“The firm of Adriaan and Welker. I am the editor for our foreign productions.”

Sophy had given a little exclamation and Grant turned to her. “This is your field,” he said, and to the Van der Veghels: “Miss Jason is with my own publishers in London.”

There were more ejaculations and much talk of coincidence while Sophy turned over in her mind what she knew of the firm of Adriaan and Welker and afterwards, as they drove away from the Palatine, confided to Grant.

“We’ve done a few of their juvenile and religious books in translation. They’re predominantly a religious publishing firm, the biggest, I fancy, in Europe. The angle is Calvinistic and, as far as children’s books go, rather nauseatingly pi. The head of the firm, Welker, is said to be the fanatical kingpin of some extreme sect in Holland. As you may imagine they do not publish much contemporary fiction.”

“Not, one would venture, a congenial milieu for the romping Van der Veghels.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sophy said vaguely. “I daresay they manage to adjust.”

“What a world-weary child!” Grant observed and shook his head at her. Sophy turned pink and fell silent.,

They were in the second car with Major Sweet, who was asleep. The other four had seated themselves, smartly, with Giovanni. Lady Braceley, offering the plea that she suffered from car sickness, had placed herself in the front seat.

The horrific evening welter of Roman traffic surged, screeched and hooted through the streets. Drivers screamed at each other, removed both hands from the wheel to fold them together in sarcastic prayer at the enormities perpetrated by other drivers. Pedestrians, launching themselves into the maelstrom, made grand opera gestures against oncoming traffic. At pavement tables, Romans read their evening papers, made love, argued vociferously, or, over folded arms, stared with portentous detachment at nothing in particular. Major Sweet lolled to and fro with his mouth open and occasionally snorted. Once he woke and said that what was wanted here was a London bobby.

“Out there,” said Grant, “he wouldn’t last three minutes.”

“Balls,” said the Major Sweet and fell asleep again. He woke when they stopped suddenly and added, “I’m most frightfully sorry, can’t think what’s come over me,” and slept again immediately.

Grant found to his surprise that Sophy, too, was at the Pensione Gallico. He himself had only moved in the day before and had not yet eaten there. He asked her if he might give her a drink at Tre Scalini in Navona. “They could pick us both up there,” he said.

“Nice idea. Thank you.”

“At half past eight then?”

He managed to make this clear to the driver.

The Major was decanted at his hotel and Sophy and Grant at the Gallico.

Grant’s room was like an oven. He bathed, lay down for an hour in a state of nature and extreme perturbation and then dressed. When he was ready he sat on his bed with his head in his hands. “If only,” he thought, “this could be the definitive moment. If only it all could stop: now,” and the inevitable reference floated up—“the be-all and the end-all here. But here, upon this bank and shoal of time—”

He thought of Sophy Jason, sitting on the Palatine Hill, her hair lifted from her forehead by the evening breeze and a look of pleased bewilderment in her face. A remote sort of girl, a restful girl who didn’t say anything silly, he thought, and then wondered if, after all, “restful” was quite the word for her. He leant over his windowsill and looked at the façades and roofs and distant cupolas.

The clocks struck eight. A horse-carriage rattled through the cobbled street below, followed by a succession of motor bicycles and cars. In an upstairs room across the way an excited babble of voices erupted and somewhere deep inside the house a remorseless, untrained tenor burst into song. Further along the second floor of the Pensione Gallico a window was thrown up and out looked Sophy, dressed in white.

He watched her rest her arms on the window ledge, dangle her hands and sniff the evening air. How strange it was to look at someone who was unaware of being observed. She was turned away from him and craned towards the end of their street where spray from a fountain in Navona could just be seen catching the light in a feathered arc. He watched her with a sense of guilt and pleasure. After a moment or two he said: “Good evening.”