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done in white-wine sauce, her eyes fixed on the far distance while she related the sensation of her taste-buds to her always better judgment. Having swallowed the test-piece she narrowed her eyes analytically, moving her tongue inside her mouth. ‘Well, Arnold,’ she said, ‘isn’t that nice that he has a girl? You know, you always misjudge that boy.’
    ‘Oh, come, it isn’t a question of judging, misjudging. No, I don’t stand judgment on anybody, far less Robert. He has his own life to live. Goodness me!’ Again, the childish laugh, the laugh of one who had been too long a schoolmaster, life-steeped in the job. ‘Mary’ he informed Curran, ‘is a professional cook, that’s why she’s so interested in the preparation of her food’
    Mary was ruminating over her salad. ‘I enjoyed that veal dish,’ she declared, with every fibre of my being. How about you, dear?’
    ‘Very good’ he said.
    ‘Mrs Tiller, are you food-tasting for a travel book or something?’ Curran said.
    ‘Not just at the moment,’ she said. ‘But I’m always tempted to take on a job like that. I always remember a restaurant, how the food is prepared, what it’s like, how it’s served. It all goes down firmly in my memory.’
    ‘Mary taught cooking at a boys’ school where I was headmaster,’ Arnold said.
    ‘A boys’ school!’ Curran marvelled.
    ‘Oh, the classes were a great success. More and more men have to cook their own food and like it,’ Arnold said, and Mary added, ‘The boys had to eat what they cooked, so they soon learned the rudiments.’
    ‘After all,’ said Arnold, as if arguing with a parent, ‘cookery is chemistry.’
    Curran paid his bill and left the couple discussing the cheese to follow. When they said goodbye they asked him, in unison, to come to drinks one evening; this was obviously a decision they had made together in a quiet exchange in the course of the meal, probably while the waiter was attending to them, or to Curran, with a clatter of serving-spoons. Curran consulted his diary and accepted with thanks, casually, as if inattentive to the unknown contingencies of anything to come.
    Mary waved her hand. ‘About seven tomorrow evening in the bar,’ she said.
    About seven next evening Curran came down to the lobby of the Hotel Lord Byron and settled in a chair in the bar-parlour beside Mary Tiller and Arnold Leaver who were waiting for him.
    Mary was wearing a fur stole round her shoulders although the hotel was centrally heated. She had that outstanding look she had the first time he had seen her on her arrival at the Pensione Sofia.
    She said, ‘It’s cosier in our room. We have a refrigerator and plenty of drinks up there.’
    ‘Yes, let’s go upstairs,’ Arnold said.
    The room was large with some comfortable chairs besides a huge ornamental bed; this bed was shaped like a swan, with gilded black swans’ heads forming the foot-posts. At the top of the bed two swans, quilted in body, met face to face with black lacquered heads and golden eyes and beaks. The ceiling was painted in a bright blue and white skyscape. Across this several cherubs blew puffily at a white-grey prancing horse and a very flesh-coloured nude classical rider whose biceps were so large as to be not really healthy.
    ‘It’s not fake,’ Arnold Leaver said, indicating these splendours. The ceiling’s eighteenth-century, restored of course, but original.’
    Curran said he could well believe it. His own room, he said, was in the modern wing.
    ‘Don’t you like Venetian styles?’ Mary said.
    Curran said he didn’t think the eighteenth century was their best period.
    ‘Well, that’s a fair observation,’ Arnold said, as if making a note on an exam paper.
    ‘I can’t tell you what fun it is,’ said Mary Tiller, ‘occupying a room like this. It’s fun. Especially as we’re on a fun-trip, you know, Arnold and I. They call this the honeymoon room, of course.’
    The abundant array of beauty bottles and jars on