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around the table, which perhaps distracted from the conflagration until it had burst into full flame. The first indication that most of them had of trouble was Tony Nash ’s melodramatic, ‘Either you take that back immediately or you’ll be sorry!’
    It was so much of a cliché that some of them thought at first it was mere parody. It took Nash’s harsh, uneven breathing to convince them that the words were serious. In the sudden, embarrassed silence which fell upon the table, it sounded unnaturally loud, announcing his emotion more clearly than his words.
    Harrington ’s laugh took a second too long to come. When it did, it sounded as stagey as the younger man’s challenge. Like a chuckle from Mr Punch as he raised his stick, it was aimed at the audience rather than his victim. His smoothly jowled face was florid, almost purple in the rosy light. How much was due to sun and fresh air, how much to wine and emotion, none of them could have said at that moment. He said, ‘Oh, come on, Tony, don’t be stupid! You know perfectly well I was joking.’ His voice was just unsteady enough for his words to lose conviction.
    ‘ I know damn well you weren’t! And so do you!’ Nash’s anger gave the banal words a weight they should not have had. Not a dignity: men brawling in a restaurant can never have that. But his blazing sense of grievance gave him an odd kind of integrity: for the first time that any of his audience could remember, he was speaking to the older man without the awareness of him as an employer.
    Meg Peters put her hand softly on top of Nash ’s broader one as she saw it quivering with rage. ‘Let it go, Tony,’ she said quietly. So the insult, whatever it had been, had been to her. Alison Munro was assailed by the uncharitable but accurate female reaction that Meg was a woman well able to look after herself. How ridiculous and impractical these men became once they began to strike poses!
    Nash shook his lover ’s hand aside almost angrily, as if it were an insect disturbing his concentration. For a moment the two men glared at each other angrily, like boys in a school playground. Then the older man shrugged. ‘If you are annoyed, Tony, of course I withdraw my remark. I’m sure the fair Meg understands that no offence was intended.’ He turned upon Ms Peters a smile that was meant to be dazzling but which emerged in its extravagance as merely false.
    The others seized on the opportunity to end an embarrassing incident. Soothing words were applied like ointment; within two minutes, the buzz of different conversations was resumed emolliently around the big table. The waiters went back into the kitchen to discuss the tensions of Home Counties emotions with the chef. The two other diners in the room resumed their whispered conversation and pretended they had not even noticed the cabaret in the centre of the room. Only Tony Nash, staring unseeing at his dessert, obstinately preserved the moment the others had banished.
    By the time they retired to the adjoining lounge for coffee, the atmosphere was almost restored. Nash, treasuring his grievance in silence, replying with monosyllables to those who sought to divert him, appeared an unlikely, even a slightly ridiculous champion. This was partly because his damsel seemed far too soph isticated to be in any real distress. Watching Meg Peters smiling and unruffled, telling against herself the story of her ridiculous indecision over dresses earlier in the day, it was difficult to see her as vulnerable enough to necessitate the raw passion of Nash’s recent defence.
    Later, replete with good food and wine, they sat with liqueurs on the flat roof at the top of the old building. It was a still, velvety night, which they were reluctant to leave. The stars and a slim crescent of moon meant that they could just catch the great curve of the river, silver in the distance as it had been since before the days of man. As if cued by the balmy warmth, a nightingale sang