“I don’t expect you to understand,” Félicité said grandly. “We were lunching and he hadn’t got a cigarette. I was doing my face at the time and I told him to help himself to my case. The letter came out of the bag with the case.”

“And he — well, never mind. What letter?”

“I know you’re going to say I’m mad. It was a sort of rough draft of a letter I sent to somebody. It had a bit in it about Carlos. When I saw it in his hand I was pretty violently rocked. I said something like ‘Hi-hi you can’t read that,’ and of course with Carlos that tore everything wide open. He said ‘So.’ ”

“So what?”

“So, all by itself. He does that. He’s Latin-American.”

“I thought that sort of ‘so’ was German.”

“Whatever it is I find it terrifying. I began to fluff and puff and tried to pass it off with a jolly laugh but he said that either he could trust me or he couldn’t and if he could, how come I wouldn’t let him read a letter? I completely lost my head and grabbed it and he began to hiss. We were in a restaurant.”

“Good Lord!”

“Well, I know. Obviously he was going to react in a really big way. So in the end the only thing seemed to be to let him have the letter. So I gave it to him on condition he wouldn’t read it till we got back to the car. The drive home was hideous. But hideous.”

“But what was in the letter, if one may ask, and who was it written to? You are confusing, Fée.”

There followed a long uneasy silence. Félicité lit another cigarette. “Come on,” said Carlisle at last.

“It happened,” said Félicité haughtily, “to be written to a man whom I don’t actually know, asking for advice about Carlos and me. Professional advice.”

“What can you mean! A clergyman? Or a lawyer?”

“I don’t think so. He’d written me rather a marvellous letter and this was thanking him. Carlos, of course, thought it was for Edward. The worst bit, from Carlos’s point of view, was where I said: ‘I suppose he’d be madly jealous if he knew I’d written to you like this.’ Carlos really got weaving after he read that. He — ”