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break the habit of a lifetime and arrive on time to do so. Sitting waiting in the corner of the local wine bar on Saturday night, Jane had got through one glass of house white and half a bowl of peanuts already. Not that she was too annoyed. No one could hold a candle to Champagne in the irritation stakes. And anyway, it was impossible to be angry with Tally. She was much too sweet and awkward. With her funny nose, large eyes, long legs and towering height, Tally had reminded Jane irresistibly of a startled ostrich the first time they clapped eyes on each other at Cambridge.
    'Do you remember,' Jane often said long after she and Tally had become friends, 'that first English tutorial on Memory when we were asked what our earliest recollections were and you said yours was of the line of servants' bells ringing in the breakfast room at home. I thought you were the most ghastly snob!'
    'I suppose I should have said they were ringing because the window sash had broken again and there was a howling gale blowing through the room.' Tally sighed. 'And that I was in there because my bedroom ceiling had collapsed and 1 was sleeping on the breakfast room floor.'
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    Tally, Jane soon realised, was not your typical upper-class girl, despite having had almost a textbook grand upbringing. From what Jane could gather, her mother had wanted her to ride but Tally was almost as scared of horses as she had been of the terrifyingly capable blondes strapping on tack at the Pony Club. Lady Julia had managed to force her daughter to be a debutante, with the result that Tally was now on intimate terms with the inside of the best lavatories in London. 'I was a hopeless deb,' she admitted. 'The only coming out I did was from the loo after everyone else had gone. I once hid in the ones at Claridge's for so long I heard the attendant tell the manager she was going to send for the plumber.'
    Tally did, however, live in a stately home, Mullions, and was the descendant of at least a hundred earls. The earls, however, had done her no favours as far as the house was concerned. 'Trust' was the Venery family motto. 'I so wish it had been Trust Fund,' Tally sighed on more than one occasion. For the heads of successive generations had, it seemed, trusted a little too much in a series of bad investments and their own skill at the card table. A sequence of earls had squandered the family resources until there was nothing left for the upkeep of a hen coop, let alone a mansion.
    'It's embarrassing really, having such hopeless ancestors,' Tally would say. 'These wasn't a Venery in sight at Waterloo or Trafalgar, for instance. But once you look at the great financial disasters, we're there with bells on. The South Sea Bubble, the Wall Street Crash, even Lloyds; you name it, we're there right in the middle of it, losing spectacularly, hand over fist.'
    Tally's own father, who had died in a car crash when she was small, had tried to reverse the situation as best he
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    could while saddled with a wife as extravagant as Lady Julia. But without much success. The result was that Mullions had been more or less a hard hat area for as long as Jane had known it. Nonetheless, Tally had, after Cambridge, decided to dedicate herself to restoring her family home to its former glory, continuing the work of her father.
    Highly romantic though all this sounded, in practice it seemed to consist of Tally rushing round the ancient heap doing running repairs to stop it falling down altogether, and using any time left over to apply for grants that never seemed to materialise. As time had gone on, Tally seemed to have gently abandoned hope of getting the place back on its feet. She had confessed to Jane frequently that getting it on its knees would be a miracle. 'Although I suppose it possesses,' she sighed, what House and Garden would call a unique untouched quality.'
    Jane scooped up another handful of nuts and looked forward to what was always a plentiful supply of stories about Tally's