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label. He seemed put out by my presence.
    “He-e-ey Sandie, what gives huh?” He turned her jaw round to face him in a manner that could have been interpreted as clumsy affection.
    “Friend of Christopher’s.” He seemed mollified.
    “A friend of Chris’s eh?.... Well good luck to you my friend. You’d better get back to him. He must be wondering where you are.”
    I took the hint and split. As I stopped at the door I caught Sandie’s glance. It expressed both contempt and interest and I thought for a moment that somewhere, sometime in the future there might be some mileage in that glance.
    Back in the front room I found Christopher in earnest conversation with someone who stood out like a sore thumb from everyone else at the party. From his voice, which I heard as I entered the room, I knew he was American. He had a presence, partly from his physical stature but also from his slow considered control.
    “Alex, meet Frank,” said Chris. “…Frank’s an admiral, full-ranking.”
    “Whoah, whoah—easy Chris, don’t you go giving out state secrets quite so easy.” He emitted a loud raucous laugh at this slice of wit.
    Admiral Frank Hough Junior, as I found out later - all the way from North Carolina. He had a typically American face. There is a whole gallery of typically American faces; his was the lean, high cheek-boned, honest country boy look. A sort of Jack Pallance or Sterling Hayden. I’d seen that face in Tennessee Valley Authority photographs of the dustbowl; I’d imagined it while reading ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ - it was part of the European mystique of the mid-west, or at least that part of America that is neither New York nor L.A., just out there somewhere in a state whose capital you couldn’t name. His whole personality came across to me that night in a five minute conversation. All I had to do as I got to know him was to fill in the colours to the right numbers.
    Chris had managed to get hold of a bottle of scotch and offered it to him.
    “Just an itty bitty drop Chris... Whoah, whoah - Jesus Christ, I’ll never drink that much.”
    “Well, Alec…. “
    “Alex.”
    “What d’you do then, Alex?”
    I sketched a few essays, largely descriptive, short on hard facts, that left him none the wiser.
    “I see, I see,” he said earnestly. “In other words, you’re a bum.”
    “Yeah. That’s a much better way of putting it.”
    “Hey Chris, why d’you surround yourself with jerks like Alex?” he shouted across the room. He was, as I say, a tall guy, and big. In a way he was good looking and in a way he had charisma. But I could think of one young lady it would be lost on…… or perhaps two young ladies. But on that strange night what did I know?
    I wandered out of the room and back up the stairs. At the top I was waylaid by another young lady. She introduced herself to me as Sheila. I thought it amusing as there was a pop song around at the time extolling the virtues of someone similarly named but with radically different qualities - if the song was to be believed. I chatted a bit to her. It turned out that she too was a friend of Chris’s. I asked her how she knew him and she told me he’d picked her up from his Daimler while she was walking along Regent Street. I asked her if she’d ever seen him before that and she said no. There’d been a woman in the car with him and they’d carted her off to a country house down past Sunbury and from then on she’d integrated into the set. She spoke highly of Chris; she seemed to like him a lot. I chatted to her for a while, gleaning what information I could on my prey, but it was plain that she didn’t see me as the focal point of her evening; she slid away downstairs, muttering about getting a drink.
    I was beginning to feel that I had honourably discharged my duties to Toby and Pascale and that I would be justified in leaving. Just then a door off the landing opened. A woman came out zipping up her skirt. Anyone who wanted to look past