‘Well of course,’ said Molly. Her hands still lay, palms upward, on her knees. She now brought them together in her lap, in an unconscious mimicry of the gesture of a child waiting for a lesson.

‘But why despise it?’ Richard, who had obviously been meaning to go on, stopped, looking at those meekly mocking hands. ‘Oh Jesus!’ he said, giving up.

‘But we don’t. It’s too — anonymous — to despise. We despise …’ Molly cut off the word you, and as if in guilt at a lapse in manners, let her hands lose their pose of silent impertinence. She put them quickly out of sight behind her. Anna, watching, thought amusedly: If I said to Molly, you stopped Richard talking simply by making fun of him with your hands, she wouldn’t know what I meant. How wonderful to be able to do that, how lucky she is …

‘Yes, I know you despise me, but why? You’re a half-successful actress, and Anna once wrote a book?’

Anna’s hands instinctively lifted themselves from beside her, and fingers touching, negligent, on Molly’s knee, said, ‘Oh what a bore you are, Richard.’ Richard looked at them, and frowned.

‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ said Molly.

‘Indeed.’

‘It’s because we haven’t given in,’ said Molly, seriously.

‘To what?’

‘If you don’t know we can’t tell you.’

Richard was on the point of exploding out of his chair — Anna could see his thigh muscles tense and quiver. To prevent a row she said quickly, drawing his fire: ‘That’s the point, you talk and talk, but you’re so far away from — what’s real, you never understand anything.’

She succeeded. Richard turned his body towards her, leaning forward so that she was confronted with his warm smooth brown arms, lightly covered with golden hair, his exposed brown neck, his brownish-red hot face. She shrank back slightly with an unconscious look of distaste, as he said: ‘Well, Anna, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know you better than I did before, and I can’t say you impress me with knowing what you want, what you think or how you should go about things.’

Anna, conscious that she was colouring, met his eyes with an effort, and drawled deliberately: ‘Or perhaps what it is you don’t like is that I do know what I want, have always been prepared to experiment, never pretend to myself the second-rate is more than it is, and know when to refuse. Hmmmm?’