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linked to Douglas’s obsession with what he called ‘social reform’, which seemed to take in everything from George Cadbury’s education of the working classes to Communism in Russia. Via popular music. ‘So what will people do to meet?’
    ‘They’ll be free to see anyone they like, whatever their background. It’ll be a classless society.’
    It was hard to tell from his tone of voice whether he thought this was a good thing or was issuing a warning. So Vivi, who rarely looked at newspapers and admitted to no real opinions of her own, made a noise of agreement, and looked out of the window again. She hoped, not for the first time, that her hair would last the evening. She should be fine for the quickstep and the Gay Gordons, her mother had said, but she might want to exercise a little caution in the Dashing White Sergeant. ‘Douglas, will you do me a favour?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I know you didn’t really want to come . . .’
    ‘I don’t mind.’
    ‘And I know you hate dancing, but if we get a few tunes in and no one’s asked me, will you promise me a dance? I don’t think I could bear to be left on the side all night.’ She pulled her hands briefly from the relative warmth of her pockets. Pearl Frost lay evenly over her nails. It glittered, opalescent, echoing the crystalline veil now creeping across the carriage window. ‘I’ve practised loads. I won’t let you down.’
    He smiled now and, despite the encroaching cold of the carriage, Vivi felt herself grow warmer. ‘You won’t be left on the side,’ he said, placing his own feet on the seat beside her. ‘But yes, silly. Course I will.’
    Framlington Hall was not one of the jewels of England’s architectural heritage. Its initial air of antiquity was deceptive: anyone with only a basic knowledge of architecture could deduce swiftly that its Gothic turrets did not sit comfortably with its Palladian pillars, that its narrow leaded windows jarred against the gabled roof of its oversized ballroom, that the unquiet red of its brick had not been weathered by more than a handful of seasons. It was, in short, a structural mongrel, a hybrid of all the worst nostalgic longings for a mythical time past, its own sense of importance imposing some standing on the flat countryside around it.
    Its gardens, when not buried under several feet of snow, were rigidly formal; the lawns carefully manicured and dense as the pile of an expensive carpet, the rose garden arranged not in a gently tangled wilderness but in rigid rows of brutally pruned bushes, each an echo in size and shape of the next. Their colours were not faded pink and peach, but blood-bright, meticulously bred or grafted in laboratories in Holland or France. To each side stood rows of evenly green leylandii , preparing, even in their extreme youth, to enclose the house and its grounds from the world outside. It was less a garden than, as one visitor had noted, a kind of horticultural concentration camp.
    Not that these considerations bothered the steady stream of guests who, overnight bags in hand, had been disgorged on to the salted drive that curved round in front of the house. Some had been personally invited by the Bloombergs, who had themselves designed the hall (and had only just been discouraged from buying a title to go with it), some had been invited through the Bloombergs’ better-placed friends, with their express permission, to create the right atmosphere. And some had simply turned up, hoping, astutely, that in the general scale of things a few extras with the right sort of faces and accents were not going to bother anyone. The Bloombergs, with a freshly minted banking fortune, and a determination to keep the debutante tradition alive for their twin daughters, were known as generous hosts. And things were more relaxed these days – no one was going to turf anyone out into the snow. Especially when there was a newly decorated interior to show off.
    Vivi had thought about this at some