‘Quite unlike her mamma,’ Lady Grylls said with a frown. ‘Ruse, you see, couldn’t have been more different.’

There was a pause. Again, Antonia was aware of a tension.

‘Aunt Nellie and Corinne’s mamma went to school together,’ Payne explained chattily. ‘They were the greatest of chums.’

Lady Grylls said that they had been to two schools together. Lady Eden‘s, then St Mary’s Ascot. At one time they had been inseparable. ‘Heaven knows why. We had so little in common. A case of opposites attracting, I suppose. Consider. I was pink, podgy, plain and placid. Ruse – her real name was Rosamund – was strikingly beautiful, wildly temperamental and extravagantly romantic. She had almond-shaped eyes and a touch of the tar-brush about her. I believe I had a crush on her for a bit.’

‘Something of a rebel, weren’t you, darling?’

‘St Mary’s was a terrible place – impossibly moralistic and repressive – consequently I rebelled, yes. One of my schoolmistresses, I remember, called me a force for anarchy. Nobody would have thought it, looking at me.’ Lady Grylls paused. ‘I stole sulphur from the chemistry lab to make stink bombs. I read The Virgin and the Gypsy at night, by torchlight, under the sheets… You know the scene where Yvette meets the gypsy and he knows at once that she is a virgin?’

‘I know the scene.’ Antonia nodded. Her husband shot her a startled look.

‘Oh, I used to get such a kick out of it! I knew several Mae West songs by heart – some unspeakably dirty ones. I used to spread rumours concerning the proclivities of our gym mistress. Well, we were all sex-mad and impossibly knowing. Ruse was particularly keen on the chaps and she used to tell everybody she was having a tempestuous affair with a guardsman. She also claimed she had Ethiopian blood in her. She was an incorrigible fantasist – a terrible liar, in fact. But she almost always managed to be extremely convincing.’ Lady Grylls stubbed out her cigarette.