Daisy Forester arrived home that evening with exciting news. Sally’s ghastly boyfriend Terence had got them all invited to a literary party and the place would be swarming with delectable poets.

Charlotte felt she had not earned the right to an invitation.

‘Don’t worry, half the people there’ll be gatecrashers. What are you going to wear?’

‘I don’t know. I’m a bit tired, really. Maybe I’ll just—’

‘Don’t be silly. You can borrow something of mine if you like. You look nice in that skirt. You suit navy.’

Charlotte could not resist Daisy, though she tried. She found herself shepherded into the bathroom and told to have first bath. ‘Leave the water, won’t you?’ Daisy called through the door.

Charlotte saw why when she turned on the tap. The big cylinder above the bath roared like a bomber on take-off, but the scalding water came only at a trickle down its narrow pipe. The room was draped in underclothes in all conditions, from the still damp to the almost desiccated. Charlotte wiped a swathe through the misting mirror on the cabinet and washed her face in cold water while she waited for the bath to fill. She did not want to go to this party, any party, but she would do it to please Daisy: if she seemed too aloof, Daisy might complain to her mother in Gloucestershire, who in turn might tell Charlotte’s mother in Edinburgh. It was through the ancient friendship of the two women, though they never saw each other any more, that her place in the flat had been arranged; and even if it was not much of a flat, she owed Daisy something.

Charlotte undressed and folded her clothes on top of the linen basket. As she lay back in the bath she wondered how Sally would compare to Daisy. The teddy bear in bed, the ‘high-up’ naval officer, the literary party . . . perhaps the gathering would be in honour of the author of Love in a Harem. Charlotte felt her face adopt what her mother called her minister of the kirk expression and stopped herself.

She climbed reluctantly from the bath to let Daisy have a turn before the water lost its heat and stood on the cork mat to dry herself.

‘Jolly good, you’re out already,’ said Daisy, who was suddenly in the room.

Charlotte presumed Daisy would back out when she saw that she had interrupted, but Daisy merely started to undress, pulling her jumper over her head to reveal the top of a much-worn slip beneath. Wrapped in a towel, Charlotte gathered up her clothes and made her way down the icy hall.

The party was in a flat in Redcliffe Square, only ten minutes’ walk along unlit streets. Daisy wore a blue silk dress; Charlotte wore a skirt and a jacket with a velvet collar and a narrow belt. Arriving at the party was like walking into a scene from the Inferno; it was what Doré might have etched if only he had known. Under the low, settled cloud of cigarette smoke Charlotte could see nothing but bodies pressed together, shouting. She could not make out the shape of the room, though the scale of the building and the double doors through which they had entered suggested something spacious, and the intensity of noise could not have been generated by fewer than 150 people. By the door, a little bald man with a bow-tie and exophthalmic eyes was addressing a tense and occasionally stammering soldier.

‘Of course,’ the small man was saying, ‘the hope was that Laval would turn his duplicity to the defeat of the Germans. But that Auvergnat dishonesty is only ever self-serving. They should have read La Rochefoucauld.’

‘Of c-c-course.’

‘There’s Sally,’ said Daisy. ‘Come with me.’

Charlotte sidestepped her way through the press, her face aching with the number of mouthed apologies she made as she followed in Daisy’s powerful slipstream. Sally was standing by a marble fireplace; she had brown, glistening hair and wide-set eyes. Her voice was high and childlike as she introduced Charlotte to a man called Terence, presumably the ghastly Terence, standing next to her.

‘Let me get you girls a drink,’ he said. ‘Gin or whisky? I think the sherry’s all gone.’ He was a big man with a frizz of fair hair retreating from a fleshy, shining face.

‘Have you seen anyone you know?’ said Daisy.

‘The man we met at the Ring of Bells – the one who told us he was a trumpeter. There’s that famous poet. I can’t remember his name.’

‘Give me a clue, darling.’

‘You remember,’ said Sally, ‘the one who wrote those poems.’

‘Is the party for anything in particular?’ said Charlotte.

Sally reached into her bag and pulled out an invitation.

‘How clever of you,’ said Daisy. ‘I didn’t think you’d actually got a card.’

Charlotte looked at it: The Directors of the Flagstaff Press invite you to celebrate the publication of The Frontier Pass & Other Poems by W. S. Melrose. ‘Which one’s Melrose?’ she asked.

‘No idea,’ said Sally. ‘He’s not very famous, is he?’

Terence pushed back with two glasses of warm gin and French, and a whisky for himself. He raised his glass to them, then drank with thirsty sucking noises.

A lugubrious-looking man with a beard was trying to climb on to a table. Charlotte looked on with some surprise as he established his footing, helped by two laughing women. He was too cumbersome and too paunchily middle-aged to be trying such tricks, but from the jacket of a tweed suit he extracted a bunch of papers which he waved in the air.

He called for silence in a bass voice whose natural resonance was muffled by the heaving room. Next to Charlotte a short and voluble man with grey-streaked sandy hair was squeezing the arm of a young woman in a black velvet dress. ‘I thought we might try to do something on old W. S. in next week’s paper,’ he loudly confided, to the woman’s evident satisfaction. Charlotte watched as the man looked up, registered her presence, smiled at her in a candidly lubricious way, then suddenly looked troubled as he saw someone making for him through the throng. ‘Excuse me, darling,’ Charlotte heard him whisper to the woman in the black dress as he moved off: ‘bore-raid warning.’

The party extended a conditional silence to the table-top speaker as conversation died to a grudging simmer. The bearded man, clearly feeling he needed no introduction, offered none, but appeared to be Melrose’s publisher. From the papers clasped in his fist, he constructed a speech about the importance of Melrose’s poetry. His appreciative remarks about the poems were interspersed with frequent references to the Government’s printing restrictions so Melrose emerged less as a powerful voice against Fascism than as a peevish critic of rationing. Before the publisher had finished his remarks the conversation had resumed a level that rendered him inaudible; his generous wish that everyone recharge their glasses had been widely anticipated.

Charlotte looked round to find that Daisy had disappeared from her side. Terence was leaning over Sally and tickling her beneath the chin while Sally looked bashfully entranced.

Charlotte saw Daisy – a few feet away, but unreachably far in the crowd – talking to two young men, one in army uniform, the other in a corduroy jacket; Daisy looked happy and poised between them. Charlotte did not feel she could impose herself on them, even if she could have barged her way that far.

She drifted from the edge of the group where she had been standing and moved deliberately round the rim of the party. Her mother had told her as an anxious teenager that the way to find someone to talk to was to be quite candid about her solitude: if she could be brave enough to let people see that she was alone, then soon enough someone would take pity. Charlotte went slowly round the edge of various groups, pausing to sip her drink, looking as honestly alone as she could in such a confined space. She elicited an occasional glance, a half-smile, but no offer of conversation. She found that she was back by the double doors by which she and Daisy had come in: the temptation was obvious.

She stepped out on to the landing and was on the point of tripping quickly down the stairs when she remembered her coat, which had been taken to a bedroom. As she turned, she saw a table with a pile of books. They were all copies of The Frontier Pass & Other Poems by W. S. Melrose. On the back was a photograph of the author: a man with a face like a rare-breed sheep in giant black spectacles. She picked up a book and opened it at random.

‘What are they like?’

‘Not bad,’ said Charlotte, looking up towards the clipped English voice. It was the man from the train.

‘Dick Cannerley. You remember, we met yesterday and—’

‘Yes, I do. What a coincidence. Are you a friend of Mr Melrose?’

‘God, no.’ Cannerley laughed. ‘Is anyone? I’m a friend of Michael Waterslow’s. It’s his flat. Come on, I’ll introduce you.’

For the second time Charlotte plunged into a Red Sea that was reluctant to part. Another glass of warm gin was pressed into her hand, and she drank it quickly in the hope that it would transform the scene from a smoky rush-hour to a starlit bacchanal. It sat in her stomach, acidly, and seemed to do nothing at all. Cannerley insinuated them into a group near the closed window; it included the little pop-eyed man who had been in the doorway, the woman in the black velvet dress, who presumably worked for the Flagstaff Press, Cannerley’s friend Michael, who looked like a civil servant, shiny and correct, and a tall man in RAF uniform with tie aslant and an expression of confused detachment.

‘In my view,’ Michael was saying, ‘the anti-Semitism of the French would have found its way to the surface with or without a Nazi invasion. Pétain’s government is merely the expression of a long-felt national wish.’

The little man with the bow tie was having none of this. He began to rattle off the opinions of various writers, puffing at his cigarette as he went along, so the names of the authors he quoted came out each in its own smoky bubble. ‘Anyway,’ he said, holding out his glass to a passing whisky bottle, ‘it’s all in Benjamin Constant.’

‘How are you on Benjamin Constant?’

Charlotte found herself addressed by the RAF man. His face was drawn into a smile. As she looked up at him Charlotte noticed a small patch just beneath his chin where he had not shaved properly. His voice was quizzical, but not threatening.

She smiled. ‘Not quite up to date, I’m afraid. What about you?’

‘I’ve never heard of him. Saint-Exupéry I’ve heard of. He’s a pilot, like me. Not Benjamin Constant, though.’ He coughed. ‘I suppose it’s not really my sort of party.’

‘What is your sort of party?’

‘I like dancing, or night-clubs. Otherwise I’d rather be outside.’

‘Flying?’

‘Yes. Or walking. But not standing around. You look like a literary girl, though.’

‘Do I really?’ Charlotte laughed. She thought of saying, ‘What makes you say that?’, but caught herself. Having eliminated the arch, she was obliged to settle for the literal. ‘I’ve just arrived in London. I wasn’t invited to the party myself.’

She was aware of a gramophone starting up. Some tinny jazz tune was cutting through the burble of talk; Daisy was at her elbow, still flanked by her two men. She wanted to be introduced to Charlotte’s pilot. Names went round; his was Peter Gregory.

Charlotte found Daisy’s back between her and Gregory and felt a twist of irritation. She saw his head bend down in polite attention to Daisy’s chatter; his hair was so untidy she wondered if he could have combed it at all before coming out.

There was a slow leakage of guests from the party. Through the double doors and down the stairs a continuous trickle of people made its way to other flats and houses, where more gin and whisky would be drunk. Those who remained began to dance. Michael Waterslow, the host, had drifted away from Charlotte’s group and helped to roll back the rug in one half of the room. Half a dozen couples were swaying to the beat on the revealed wooden floor. Among them, weaving a solitary pattern, was one who bore the unmistakably sheepish look of the author.

With Gregory’s hand lightly on her back, Charlotte tried to remember the quickstep movements learned at Mrs Heaton’s dancing class; as one of the taller girls she had usually taken the boy’s part, and now the backward movements seemed elusive. In any event, Gregory was what might politely have been called an instinctive mover; he did not seem to be following any particular step, though there was a vague rhythm in his shambling movement and a certainty of touch on her hand and back. He talked to her a little, but his voice seemed to come from too great a height to be able to compete with the hopping tenor saxophones. Charlotte briefly closed her eyes as she swept about the floor. This was a mistake, she recognised at once, when not just her body but the whole of Redcliffe Square seemed to spin within Gregory’s retaining grasp. She opened her eyes, gripped his hand a fraction tighter and was aware of a tiny line of damp along her upper lip.

After the song had finished she went to the top of the stairs, where she hoped the air would be fresher. Dick Cannerley emerged from the flat and asked if she would dance with him. The thought filled Charlotte with a disproportionate revulsion. She wondered where Gregory had gone. She had not excused herself from him but hurried off rudely. She went back into the flat to apologise to him, to find Daisy and tell her she was leaving, to thank Michael for the party, to escape from Cannerley . . . She was not sure why she went back across the dance floor, which had become, in her short absence, like some ruleless rugby game of lurching communal contact. She reached the other side and found the woman from the Flagstaff Press in a deep embrace with the sandy-haired editor: whatever he might do for Melrose ‘next week’ did not seem to be, in the view of the publishing woman, soon enough. Seeing no one else she knew, Charlotte decided that all she could do was leave. She set off to fetch her coat and bag from the bedroom and was almost knocked over by a man being roughly ejected from a group of people by the door. Swearing and muttering, he staggered to the landing and plunged down the stairs at an involuntary run, bouncing heavily off the wall. In the bedroom Charlotte found a couple lying on top of her coat: the woman’s dress had ridden up round her thighs, and she was laughing in an enthusiastic, horsy way. Charlotte wrenched her coat clear and made for the landing. She threw one last look behind her as she went downstairs and out into the night, where the cold wind drove the air from her chest. By the railings in front of the house a man was being sick into the basement area; he turned his anguished, sweating face up to her. Even in the blackout, she could recognise beneath the giant spectacles a particular sheeplike quality. ‘Baa,’ he said.