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in any case, it will dry during the day and I shall not mind it at all. But I felt I should tell you.’
    A light rattling of the newspaper in her hands showed Villy that poor Miss Milliment was nervous. Her compassion for her companion, for the years of nasty landladies that she must have endured, filled her heart now with real feeling, and she put her arm round the bulky shoulders. ‘You mustn’t worry. Anybody can spill a cup of tea.’
    In the bus later, on her way to the dreary office in Queen Anne Street, she realised that this was already the third episode of tea-spilling in a month.

DIANA AND EDWARD
    ‘Oh, darling! How awful for you! Poor Duchy!’
    ‘She had a very good life.’
    ‘Of course she did.’
    ‘Although people always say that, as though it makes everything all right.’
    ‘She didn’t suffer any pain, though, did she?’
    ‘Rachel said not, according to Hugh. Let’s have the other half, shall we?’
    She walked across the room to pick up the cocktail shaker that stood, with a large array of drinks, on the ebony table. She was wearing a crêpe dress of an electric blue that careless people might have said matched her eyes.
    ‘But it doesn’t alter the fact that she’s gone – no longer there.’
    ‘Of course it doesn’t, my poor darling.’
    As she bent down to refill his glass he could see the immensely comforting size of her breasts. ‘I’ll have to go down tomorrow.’
    She was silent while he lit a cigarette. ‘Want to come with me?’
    Diana seemed to consider. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘Of course I’d love to, but I think Rachel should have you to herself.’
    ‘That’s what I love about you. You’re such an unselfish person. Well – one of the things.’
    ‘Also, we had promised to take Jamie out to lunch on Sunday. I don’t want to let him down.’
    Jamie was in his last year at Eton, which Diana had persuaded Edward to pay for on the grounds that her other two sons had been there, and Jamie was actually his. He was now eighteen, very like his brothers in appearance, and showed no signs of being a Cazalet. What with him, Roly at Radley and Villy’s allowance (he had made the St John’s Wood house over to her and had set up a trust to pay her maintenance), he was pretty pushed, and had used up most of the money the Brig had left him. Diana had set her heart on renting a villa in the south of France, had invited her brother and his wife, so he had had to splash out on that, his only stipulation being that Louise should come with them – ‘My two favourite women,’ he had maddeningly said – and, although she knew that Louise disliked her as much as she disliked Louise, Diana had had to comply.
    She had been married to Edward for just over five years, and they now lived in a large, neo-Georgian house in West Hampstead with a housekeeper, Mrs Atkinson, who occupied a flat on the top floor. There was also a cleaner, who came three times a week to do the housework, and so, for the first time in her life, Diana had no money worries and was free to do as she pleased. There had been one setback soon after they moved in and before they were married when Edward had been quite seriously ill after a minor operation; she had been afraid he might die before they were married, and that she would be back to widowhood with three boys, hostile in-laws, living on the pittance that an army pension provided (Angus’s parents had never forgiven her for living with a man she was not married to, a married man who had left his wife for her with the ensuing disgrace of a divorce).
    All those thoughts made it sound as though she didn’t love Edward when of course she did. At the beginning she had thought of him with agony and intermittent delight, but as the affair settled to a rut of romantic assignations with no sign that the situation would ever change, she had recognised that excitement and uncertainty no longer satisfied her. She longed for security – a home rather than rented