‘Tea at Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant? That would be suitably oriental after the song.’

‘What do you think? I haven’t been there for ages. It wasn’t very exciting on my last visit. Besides, I never felt quite the same about Casanova’s after that business of Barnby and the waitress. It would be cheaper to drink tea at home – and no less Chinese as I have a packet of Lapsang.’

‘As you like.’

‘But why did they dwell on the cool waters? I can’t understand the preposition. Were they in a boat?’

A habit of Moreland’s was to persist eternally with any subject that caught his fancy, a characteristic to intensify in him resolute approach to a few things after jettisoning most outward forms of seriousness; a love of repetition sometimes fatiguing to friends, when Moreland would return unmercifully to some trivial matter less amusing to others than to himself.

‘Do you think they were in a boat?’ he went on. ‘The poem is called a Kashmiri Love Song. My aunt used to sing it. Houseboats are a feature of Kashmir, aren’t they?’

‘Kipling characters go up there to spend their leave.’

‘When we lived in Fulham my aunt used to sing that song to the accompaniment of the pianoforte.’

He paused in the street and offered there and then a version of the piece as loudly trilled by his aunt, interrupting himself once or twice to emphasise contrast with the rendering we had just heard. Moreland’s parents had died when he was a child. This aunt, who played a large part in his personal mythology, had brought him up. Oppressed, no doubt, by her nephew’s poor health and by thought of the tubercular complaint that had killed his father (who had some name as teacher of music), she was said to have ‘spoiled’ Moreland dreadfully.