William was engaged in his curious, ultimately rather alarming conversation with Angelica, in the flat directly below his in Corduroy Mansions Caroline was making a series of telephone calls, the last of which was to her friend James.

Caroline and James had now known one another for not much more than a year, but each felt as if the other was an old friend. They had met on the first day of the course on which they were both enrolled at Sotheby's Art Institute - a one-year Master's course in art history designed specifically for those with their sights on a career in the fine art auction rooms or in a gallery. There were twenty-three people on the course that year, every one of them paying, or rather having paid on their behalf, the seventeen thousand pounds in fees that the course commanded. In Caroline's case this cost was borne by her father, a reasonably well-off land agent in Cheltenham. He had grumbled about it, but had eventually come to share his wife's view that the chances of Caroline's meeting what she described, with no trace of irony, as a nice boy were substantially increased by her being involved in the world of expensive auctions. Little did he know.

James met the fees for the course himself, dipping into a legacy left him by an aunt. The legacy was enough to pay the fees and keep him for that year and perhaps a year or two beyond. “And then it's work,” he said. “Reality catches up with one, you know - sooner or later.”