She threw back her head and laughed like a boy

From that moment she had been Artemis, even when her hunting-spears—the golf-clubs—were put away and she had only her cigarette holder to brandish like a ritual dart. And now here they were, the impetus of celebration having lasted through the hours of sleep and whirled them up in her rowdy Frazer Nash to see the famous sunset, alone together all afternoon apart from the waiters and the band and the braying French.

‘But I’m serious,’ she said. ‘About things changing, I mean. Don’t you feel it—since the War, I suppose—how old were you when it ended?’

‘Fourteen.’

It seemed another measure of their intimacy that he could answer without stiffness or shame at the introduction of this half-tabu subject, which so permeated the ideas and talk of Father’s generation, and his brother Gerald’s too, but was so deliberately ignored by his own.