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the train tickets, pre-planned the day in some detail, went to a small Italian restaurant in Hampstead (also recommended by James, who lived there), clucked over their poor seats in the half-empty matinée and stealthily stole to better seats after ten minutes or so, using the pretending-to-go-to-the-Gents’ manoeuvre. He even asked her if she ought not to be wearing a coat in this weather! She did not have a coat. She only just prevented him from buying some hideous garment in the January sales. She insisted on the adequacy of her oldblack leather jacket and soon he took a liking to it. Very gradually his attentions, for they could be chastely and rather formally described in that word, began to touch feelings in her she had thought dead.
    â€˜Your mother trusted me, I think,’ Joe said to their daughter, ‘that was the heart of it. And she was right.’ He paused and sought to engage with the look in his daughter’s, her mother’s, eyes. ‘And she was wrong.’
    Joe introduced them with pride.
    â€˜David Green – David knows everything about who’s who in Oxford; Natasha Prévost.’ He had described her to David at length one evening in David’s enviable Georgian rooms in St John’s Street.
    Joe had chosen the bar of the Randolph which David liked and which for Natasha was conveniently across the road from the Ashmolean. To Joe it suppurated exclusivity and made him uncomfortable but his determination was that David and Natasha know and like each other and if it had to be the bar of the Randolph then that was the price. It was not part of his experience, a clubby male bar casually crowded with the latest inheritors of Brideshead, informal in expensive sports jackets, cravats and cavalry twill trousers.
    David watched him go across to the bar with what Natasha construed as a possessive amusement.
    â€˜He is your marionette?’ said Natasha.
    â€˜He is yours,’ said David.
    She liked his boldness. David Green was rather large, constantly in movement as if physically uneasy but the movements seemed choreographed; his hair black and long, his face generous and expressive, mouth thin, vivid, rate of speech rapid, emphatic, punctuated by giggles which Natasha came to delight in.
    â€˜Let me say this at once,’ said David, ‘while Joe’s at the bar (I know you prefer Joseph). He described you perfectly but what I had not been prepared for was a certain hauteur which makes you rather nearer my class than his although I do know they order things differently in la France.’ He pronounced ‘la France’ in the French way.
    Natasha was yet some time away from being fond of David and he had moved too fast on a first encounter.
    â€˜
Je m’excuse, mais
in France we do not fly to conclusions with so little proof.’
    â€˜Ah!
La logique française.’
    â€˜Non. Good manners,
anglais.’
    â€˜Touché.’
    â€˜Joseph is very fond of you.’ Natasha looked at him steadily. ‘He is not difficult to impress.’
    â€˜His unguardedness, which I love, and his defencelessness may be a little more seductive than you imagine.’
    â€˜Seductive? I don’t think so.’
    â€˜I am probably wrong. I’m told I make rather a habit of it.’
    â€˜Told?’
    â€˜People!’ He waved his hand at the early evening crowd in the bar. ‘Critics.’
    â€˜Are you on the stage?’
    â€˜Ah!’ said David, relieved at Joe’s arrival. ‘The drinks.’ For Natasha and himself halves of bitter, for David a cocktail.
    David sipped at the cocktail almost distastefully. Joe was to realise that David did not really enjoy drinking and his aim was to avoid being an outsider by imbibing steadily but as little as possible. As he sipped, an action which necessarily gave him pause, his eyes swivelled around the room and lit up at several recognitions which his eyebrows and the ends of his