He looked at his watch. They were an hour later in France, it was too late to ring them now, and he welcomed this rational and thoughtful postponement with a sense of cloudy relief. He went over to the much-neglected piano, its black lid the podium for various old art folios and a small bronze bust of Liszt-which seemed to give a rather pained glance at his sight-reading from the Mozart album on the stand. To Nick himself the faltering notes were like raindrops on a sandy path, and he was filled with a sense of what his evening could have been. The simple Andante became a vivid dialogue in his mind between optimism and recurrent pain; in fact it heightened both feelings to an unnecessary degree. It wasn't long until Catherine stood up and said, "For god's sake, darling, it's not a fucking funeral."

"Sorry, darling," said Nick, and vamped through a few seconds of what they called Waldorf music before getting up and wandering out on to the balcony. They had only just started calling each other darling, and it seemed a nice part of the larger conspiracy of life at Kensington Park Gardens; but outside in the cool of the night Nick felt he was play-acting, and that Catherine was frighteningly strange to him. Her mirage of the beautiful poisonous universe shimmered before him again for a moment, but he couldn't hold it, and it slipped quickly away.

There was a supper party in a nearby back garden, and the talk and light clatter carried on the still air. A man called Geoffrey was making everyone laugh, and the women kept calling out his name in excited protest between the semi-audible paragraphs of his story. Out in the communal gardens someone was walking a small white dog, which looked almost luminous as it bobbed and scampered in the late dusk. Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak violet heights. In summer, when windows everywhere were open, night seemed made of sound as much as shadow, the whisper of the leaves, the unsleeping traffic rumble, far-off car horns and squeals of brakes; voices, faint shouts, a waveband twiddle of unconnected music.