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now standing over by the window – ‘. . . like Bell.’
    The room exploded in laughter, different varieties of sarcastic cackling, all the way from Slatter's wheezing, nominal ‘Hugh-hugh-hugh-’ to Reiser's exploitative, pronominal ‘Her-her-her-her-'; even Bell heaved a little. Richard was still too dazed to be shamed by this; he was running over the past minute or so in his mind, again and again. Had there really been four Bells in the room? Or had it just appeared that way? After all, Bell's ubiquity was undeniable; and if Richard was going to have a hallucination, it was fairly likely to incorporate the man whose actions, whose thoughts, obsessed him. If it hadn't been Bell, who else but –
    ‘Ursula!’ cried Mearns, the greenmailer. ‘How lovely to see you; you look quite, quite marvellous.’ He rose and went to meet her. Richard unstuck his head from his hands and blinked. She was standing in the doorway,bracing herself with both hands held above her head. She had one thigh raised up and half-crossed over the top of the other. She was wearing some sort of golden, spangled top, the spangles scattered over a fine mesh that exposed as much as it concealed her magnificent embonpoint. And Ursula wasn't just wearing a short skirt, she was wearing a pelmet – a little flange of thick, green, brocaded material that hung down, barely covering her lower abdomen. To either side of this lappet, flaring curtains of material descended. If Ursula had been straight-legged, ordinarily disposed, this would have presented a decorous enough picture. However, given the attitude she had struck, the longer drapes of cloth fell away, making an arch that framed the very juncture of her thighs. Richard let fly with a deep, glottal groan.
    This was ignored by the others, who all rose and went over to Ursula. One by one they all kissed the air some inches in front of her cheek, as exemplary an acknowledgement as possible of the fact that they would rather be some inches inside her body.
    Richard looked on from where he was slumped. Would she give some indication that she was sorry to have missed their rendezvous, that this was an unwanted and hateful turn of events? She did, in the form of liftingup the fingers of one hand, pushing them in his direction, and chafing the two middle ones together.
    Much, much later that evening, the clique were encabbed and heading east. There had been some calls for a trip to a restaurant, but Mearns – whose party, after all, it was – had already had dinner with Pablo (the clique's preferred euphemism – this month – for doing cocaine), and couldn't be bothered, as he put it, with ‘paying x quid cover charge, x quid service charge, and twenty-bloody-x for food to play patty-cake with – rather than eat’. Once the other cliquers had snacked with Mr Escobar as well, they didn't argue.
    Mearns's greenmail party had begun the same way as any other cliquey evening at the Sealink, continued the same way as any cliquey evening at the Sealink, and was now speedily moving towards a dénouement of crushing obviousness: they were going to Limehouse to smoke opium.
    Bell was up front, speaking to the cab driver. Richard and Mearns sat in the back, either side of Ursula, while the others were following in another cab. It had taken masterly powers of anticipation, of jockeying, for Richard to get this close to Ursula. Not that shewas ignoring Richard any more than usual – she was simply ignoring him.
    The cabbie – who was a middle-aged Syrian man with a Colonel Blimpish moustache, beach-ball paunch and shattered air – was telling Bell a long and involved story, haltingly and with real feeling, about his imprisonment and torture for an attempt on the life of President Assad. Bell appeared to be concentrating deeply on the story. He studied the cabbie's pained face intently, nodding, uttering tiny, encouraging grunts. But it was difficult for Richard to hear everything, because the radio was on and