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glass discreetly behind one of the perhaps priceless china ornaments. I hadn’t realised that Skelton bottled aperitifs as well as emptying septic tanks. I nod politely at Laura’s parcelled hand. ‘You haven’t …?’
    ‘Don’t worry about her ,’ says Tony. ‘She’s always in thewars. If she’s not putting her hand on the hotplate she’s falling down the stairs. If she’s not falling down the stairs she’s falling down in the middle of the floor, either because there’s no carpet and there ought to be carpet or there is carpet and she’s got her toe under the edge of it.’
    He watches her as he speaks. He’s a watchful man, it occurs to me. He was watching us earlier, I realize, to see how we were taking his buffoonery. He’s watching Laura now because he’s irritated by her, and he wants to see whether he’s managing to irritate her back.
    ‘Or through the middle of it,’ she says, giving us a little taut smile. He’s succeeding.
    ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘Stoves, stairs, rugs, everything in the house – something wrong with all of them. All conspiring against her. Poor sweetheart.’
    And he’s anxious about her. Poor sweetheart her, certainly, but poor sweetheart him, too. He’s afraid she’s going to run off with someone. Me, perhaps, I think suddenly. I see the whole story unrolling in front of us. It’s only too plausible. Impotent ageing husband; discontented young wife. Now this comical egghead appears in the district. Someone strangely different. Grey tweed jacket instead of brown. And closer to her own age – someone she can talk to. ‘A philosopher?’ I imagine her breathing. I’ve never met a philosopher before …’
    Whereupon some great tragic saga commences. Which might at least save me from writing the book. And there’s something unsettling about her, I have to admit. The looseness of that scarlet sweater challenges the imagination, for a start.
    I glance at Kate, and make a tiny subliminal face that means I’m trying not to smile. She subliminally suppresses a smile back.
    Laura holds up a packet of cigarettes. ‘You don’t mind?’
    ‘Of course they mind,’ says Tony.
    And of course we do. ‘Of course not,’ I say.
    ‘If you didn’t drop so much ash on the carpets there wouldn’t be so many holes in them,’ says Tony.
    ‘Most of the holes in these carpets were there before cigarettes were invented,’ says Laura. ‘So you’re some great art whizz, are you?’
    I realize that she’s looking at me through the smoke screen she’s laying down, belatedly demonstrating a little polite interest in her guests. I nod at Kate. ‘Not me. Her.’
    Laura switches her gaze to Kate. ‘Oh, wonderful,’ she says. Kate, of course, says nothing; merely looks as if she’s been caught out in some slightly disreputable piece of behaviour.
    ‘She’s at the Hamlish,’ I explain, God knows why, except that I feel some obscure need to validate our lives in these alien surroundings. ‘In the Ecclesiology Department. Comparative Christian iconography.’
    ‘Wow,’ says Laura. ‘Do you know the little man round here?’
    Kate looks startled. So, I imagine, do I. There’s a local iconographer? A little man who pops round to decipher your mysterious griddles, keys and lions?
    ‘He’s rather a sweetie,’ says Laura. I deduce from this, as obscurely as Laura was prompted to think of it, that she means not the local iconographer but the local Christian – the little man in the rectory. She’s given up on Kate, though, and turned back to me. ‘So what are you, then?’
    ‘He’s a philosopher,’ says Kate.
    ‘My God,’ says Laura. ‘I’ve never met a philosopher before.’
    You see? It’s all starting to happen. Though somehow I hadn’t imagined the conversation taking place through ahaze of cigarette smoke. Or my end of it being conducted for me by my wife.
    ‘But he’s moving into art,’ Kate tells Laura, amazingly loquacious now the subject is me