The party was given in one of those long, high eau de nihilistic Sloane Square rooms where you always think something exciting is happening at the other end, and it never is. One of the flatmates, Marcia, had even asked her mother. Not that I’ve anything against mothers in the right context, but at parties they do waste valuable hunting time. And this one was a twenty-stone do-gooder, who’d set like a great pink blancmange on the sofa. Every so often unfortunate guests were clobbered to talk to her.

‘Eats, anyone?’ said another flatmate, waving a plate under our noses. ‘I’m sure you’re not on a diet, Pru, you’re so skinny.’

‘I’m starving,’ I said, spearing a sausage. ‘I only had time to grab a sandwich-board man at lunchtime.’

‘I do hope I don’t pong,’ confided the flatmate. ‘Marcia filled the bath with ice so none of us could have a bath.’

Next minute Marcia rolled up with two new arrivals.

‘I want you to meet Eileen,’ she said, introducing me to a large blonde with dirty finger nails, ‘who makes absolutely sooper jewellery. I know you’d like some, Pru. And this is Clifford, our firm’s accountant, who’s very clever with figures.’

‘Only some figures,’ said Clifford, leering at my too tight Bermudas, then braying with laughter and spraying cashew nuts all over me, between the gap in his front teeth.

I asked Eileen about the ‘sooper’ jewellery.

‘Oh please don’t interrogate me,’ she said. ‘I’m so tired,’ and proceeded to describe the entire plot of a film she’d seen that afternoon.

‘I work in Harrods,’ said a pale girl, ‘but in the book department,’ as though that made it better.