As the guests moved out to the garden and the basket-chairs round the lawn, Lucy went with them, and while she was waiting to see if sufficient chairs had been provided before taking one for herself, she was seized upon by Beau, who said: “Miss Pym! There you are! I’ve been hunting for you. I want you to meet my people.”

She turned to a couple who were just sitting down and said: “Look, I’ve found Miss Pym at last.”

Beau’s mother was a very lovely woman; as lovely as the best beauty parlours and the most expensive hairdressers could make her — and they had good foundation to work on since when Mrs Nash was twenty she must have looked very like Beau. Even now, in the bright sunlight, she looked no older than thirty-five. She had a good dressmaker too, and bore herself with the easy friendly confidence of a woman who has been a beauty all her life; so used to the effect she had on people that she did not have to consider it at all and so her mind was free to devote itself to the person she happened to be meeting.

Mr Nash was obviously what is called an executive. A fine clear skin, a good tailor, a well-soaped look, and a general aura of mahogany tables with rows of clean blotters round them.

“I should be changing. I must fly,” said Beau, and disappeared.

As they sat down together Mrs Nash looked quizzically at Lucy and said: “Well, now that you are here in the flesh, Miss Pym, we can ask you something we are dying to know. We want to know how you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Impress Pamela.”

“Yes,” said Mr Nash, “that is just what we should like to know. All our lives we have been trying to make some impression on Pamela, but we remain just a couple of dear people who happen to be responsible for her existence and have to be humoured now and then.”

“Now you, it seems, are quite literally something to write home about,” Mrs Nash said, and raised an eyebrow and laughed.

“If it is any consolation to you,” Lucy offered, “I am greatly impressed by your daughter.”

“Pam is nice,” her mother said. “We love her very much; but I wish we impressed her more. Until you turned up no one has made any impression on Pamela since a Nanny she had at the age of four.”

“And that impression was a physical one,” Mr Nash volunteered.

“Yes. The only time in her life that she was spanked.”

“What happened?” Lucy asked.

“We had to get rid of the Nanny!”

“Didn’t you approve of spanking?”

“Oh yes, but Pamela didn’t.”

“Pam engineered the first sit-down strike in history,” Mr Nash said.

“She kept it up for seven days,” Mrs Nash said. “Short of going on dressing and forcibly feeding her for the rest of her life, there was nothing to do but get rid of Nanny. A first-rate woman she was, too. We were devastated to lose her.”

The music began, and in front of the high screen of the rhododendron thicket appeared the bright colours of the Junior’s Swedish folk dresses. Folk-dancing had begun. Lucy sat back and thought, not of Beau’s childish aberrations, but of Innes, and the way a black cloud of doubt and foreboding was making a mockery of the bright sunlight.

It was because her mind was so full of Innes that she was startled when she heard Mrs Nash say: “Mary, darling. There you are. How nice to see you again,” and turned to see Innes behind them. She was wearing boy’s things; the doublet and hose of the fifteenth century; and the hood that hid all her hair and fitted close round her face accentuated the bony structure that was so individual. Now that the eyes were shadowed and sunk a little in their always-deep sockets, the face had something it had not had before: a forbidding look. It was — what was the word? — a “fatal” face. Lucy remembered her very first impression that it was round faces like that that history was built.

“You have been overworking, Mary,” Mr Nash said, eyeing her.

“They all have,” Lucy said, to take their attention from her.

“Not Pamela,” her mother said. “Pam has never worked hard in her life.”

No. Everything had been served to Beau on a plate. It was miraculous that she had turned out so charming.

“Did you see me make a fool of myself on the boom?” Innes asked, in a pleasant conversational tone. This surprised Lucy, somehow; she had expected Innes to avoid the subject.

“My dear, we sweated for you,” Mrs Nash said. “What happened? Did you turn dizzy?”

“No,” said Beau, coming up behind them and slipping an arm into Innes’s, “that is just Innes’s way of stealing publicity. It is not inferior physical powers, but superior brains the girl has. None of us has the wit to think up a stunt like that.”

Beau gave the arm she was holding a small reassuring squeeze. She too was in boy’s clothes, and looked radiant; even the quenching of her bright hair had not diminished the glow and vivacity of her beauty.

“That is the last of the Junior’s efforts — don’t they look gay against that green background? — and now Innes and I and the rest of our put-upon set will entertain you with some English antics, and then you shall have tea to sustain you against the real dancing to come.”

And they went away together.

“Ah, well,” said Mrs Nash, watching her daughter go, “I suppose it is better than being seized with a desire to reform natives in Darkest Africa or something. But I wish she would have just stayed at home and been one’s daughter.”

Lucy thought that it was to Mrs Nash’s credit that, looking as young as she did, she wanted a daughter at home.

“Pam was always mad on gym. and games,” Mr Nash said. “There was no holding her. There never was any holding her, come to that.”

“Miss Pym,” said The Nut Tart, appearing at Lucy’s elbow, “do you mind if Rick sits with you while I go through this rigmarole with the Seniors?” She indicated Gillespie, who was standing behind her clutching a chair, and wearing his habitual expression of grave amusement.

The wide flat hat planked slightly to the back of her head on top of her wimple — Wife of Bath fashion — gave her an air of innocent astonishment that was delightful. Lucy and Rick exchanged a glance of mutual appreciation, and he smiled at her as he sat down on her other side.

“Isn’t she lovely in that get-up,” he said, watching Desterro disappear behind the rhododendrons.

“I take it that a rigmarole doesn’t count as dancing.”

“Is she good?”

“I don’t know. I have never seen her, but I understand she is.”

“I’ve never even danced ballroom stuff with her. Odd, isn’t it. I didn’t even know she existed until last Easter. It maddens me to think she has been a whole year in England and I didn’t know about it. Three months of odd moments isn’t very long to make any effect on a person like Teresa.”

“Do you want to make an effect?”

“Yes.” The monosyllable was sufficient.

The Seniors, in the guise of the English Middle Ages, ran out on to the lawn, and conversation lapsed. Lucy tried to find distraction in identifying legs and in marvelling over the energy with which those legs ran about after an hour of strenuous exercise. She said to herself: “Look, you have to go to Henrietta with the little rosette tonight. All right. That is settled. There is nothing you can do, either about the going or the result of the going. So put it out of your mind. This is the afternoon you have been looking forward to. It is a lovely sunny day, and everyone is pleased to see you, and you should be having a grand time. So relax. Even if — if anything awful happens about the rosette, it has nothing to do with you. A fortnight ago you didn’t know any of these people, and after you go away you will never see any of them again. It can’t matter to you what happens or does not happen to them.”

All of which excellent advice left her just where she was before. When she saw Miss Joliffe and the maids busy about the tea-table in the rear she was glad to get up and find some use for her hands and some occupation for her mind.

Rick, unexpectedly, came with her. “I’m a push-over for passing plates. It must be the gigolo in me.”

Lucy said that he ought to be watching his lady-love’s rigmaroles.

“It is the last dance. And if I know anything of my Teresa her appetite will take more app............