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Elliottsaid, laughing.
    “Did you tell him we’re all going to a play together Saturday?”
    “Yes. You didn’t get tickets for
Cats
, did you?”
    “I didn’t get tickets for anything,” I said. “I ran out of time.”
    “Well,
don’t
get tickets for
Cats.
Or
Phantom
.”
    Sara came running up, flushed and breathless. “I’m sorry. Cath and I got to talking,” she said. She gave me a smacking kiss on the lips. “Goodbye, youadorable hunk. See you Saturday.”
    “Come
on
,” Elliott said. “You can kiss him all you like on Saturday.” He hustled her out the door. “And not
Les Miz
!” he shouted back to me.
    I stood, smiling after them. You’re wrong, Cath, I thought. Look at them. Not only would Sara never have kissed me like that if she were having an affair, but Elliott wouldn’t have looked on complacently like that, andneither of them would have been talking about china, about
Cats.
    Cath had made a mistake. Her radar, usually so infallible, had messed up this time. Sara and Elliott’s marriage was fine. Nobody was having an affair, and we’d all have a great time Saturday night.
    The mood persistedthrough the rest of the evening, in spite of Marjorie’s latching onto me and telling me all about the Decline andFall of her father, who she was going to have to put in a nursing home, and our finding out that the pub that had had such great fish and chips the first time we’d been here had burned down.
    “It doesn’t matter,” Cath said, standing on the corner where it had been. “Let’s go to the Lamb and Crown. I know it’s still there. I saw it on the way to Harrods this morning.”
    “That’s on Wilton Place,isn’t it?” I said, pulling out my tube map. “That’s right across from Hyde Park Corner Station. We can take—”
    “A taxi,” Cath said.
    Cath didn’t say anything else about the affair she thought Sara was having, except to tell me they were going shopping again the next day. “Selfridge’s first, and then Reject China—” and I wondered if she had realized, seeing Sara at the party, that she’d made amistake.
    But in the morning, as I was leaving, she said, “Sara called and cancelled while you were in the shower.”
    “They can’t go to the play with us Saturday?”
    “No,” Cath said. “She isn’t going shopping with me today. She said she had a headache.”
    “She must havedrunk some of that awful sherry,” I said. “So what are you going to do? Do you want to come have lunch with me?”
    “I think it’ssomeone at the conference.”
    “Who?” I said, lost.
    “The man Sara’s having an affair with,” she said, picking up her guidebook. “If it was someone who lived here, she wouldn’t risk seeing him while we’re here.”
    “She’s
not
having an affair,” I said. “I saw her. I saw Elliott. He—”
    “Elliott doesn’t know.” She jammed the guidebook savagely into her bag. “Men never notice anything.”
    She began stuffingthings into her bag—her sunglasses, her umbrella. “We’re having dinner with the Hugheses tonight at seven. I’ll meet you back here at five-thirty.” She picked up her umbrella.
    “You’re wrong,” I said. “They’ve been married longer than we have. She’s crazy about Elliott. Why would somebody with that much to lose risk it all by having an affair?”
    She turned and looked at me, still holding the umbrella.“I don’t know,” she said bleakly.
    “Look,” I said, suddenly sorry for her, “why don’t you come and have lunch with the Old Man and me? He’ll probably get us thrown out like he did at that Indian restaurant. It’ll be fun.”
    She shook her head. “You and Arthur will want to catch up, and I don’t want to wait on Selfridge’s.” She looked up at me. “When you see Arthur—” she paused, looking like shedid when she was thinking about Sara.
    “You think he’s having an affair, too, oh, Madame Knows-All, Sees-All?”
    “No,” she said. “He was older than