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suite: bedroom, dressing-room and bathroom.’
    Curran withdrew discreetly, but Robert did not.
    There must have been a mistake,’ said Arnold Leaver. I reserved single rooms, for Mrs Tiller and for myself.’
    There is one single room for Leaver, already taken,’ said the perplexed lady at the desk, who happened to be Eufemia. She was joined, then, by Katerina, who bent her head likewise over the ledger. ‘Leaver,’ said Katerina, pointing a finger to the place; both she and Eufemia pronounced the name ‘Leāver’.
    Robert, who was close beside his father and companion at the other side of the desk, put in, ‘I’m the Leāver in that room. This is my father Mr Arnold Leāver and Mrs Tiller who both want single rooms.’
    ‘We have single rooms on different floors, will that do?’ Katerina said. She looked suspicious but tolerant. She said, ‘We have a double room booked for a Mr and Mrs Leāver.’
    Those single rooms will do’ said Robert’s father. He pulled out his passport and Mary Tiller coolly revealed that her passport was packed away in her luggage. There and then she opened one of her pieces of matched luggage to produce it, in spite of the two proprietors’ protests that she could bring it down later, at her convenience. Meantime, Robert noticed that his father’s well-worn passport was a double one, made out in the names of Arnold Leaver colour of eyes grey, colour of hair grey, and his wife Anthea colour of eyes blue, colour of hair fair. He couldn’t see the photographs on the passport from where he stood, but Mrs Tiller’s eyes and hair corresponded well enough with those attributed to the absent Anthea. She was not unlike Anthea, a younger Anthea and more flamboyant. That’s typical, Robert thought. He leaves one woman for another practically the same.
    ‘Here you are!’ Mary Tiller said with a perceptible look of triumph towards Robert, defying his thought with her common cheeriness, so unlike his mother’s. She held out the passport, open on the name-and-address page, while handing it over the counter, so that Robert, if he wanted, could clearly see that she had her own. Robert looked away at something vaguely else, then turned his head towards his father. ‘Anyone would think,’ he said with nasty geniality, ‘that you were travelling as man and wife. Double passport—Double room booked. …’
    ‘How could you say such a thing?’ said the father in a hushed and beautiful tone, as if Robert had committed something reproachable in church. ‘It’s not funny,’ he said. ‘It could be embarrassing, their inefficiency, if there was anything to be embarrassed about, which of course there isn’t.’
    ‘How could you have done such a thing?’ Curran said. He was standing with Robert in a bar near the Rialto Bridge, taking a coffee. Curran said, ‘It was a horrible sight the way you embarrassed your father. It was also very indiscreet, very uncivilised and, in the civilised sense, unnatural’
    ‘I meant it,’ Robert said.
    That’s my point,’ Curran said. ‘Positively destructive. We have enough difficulties without creating unnecessary antagonism.’
    ‘Speak for yourself’
    ‘Why?’ said Curran. ‘Why should I? If I choose to speak for us both, after all this time, I’ll do it. Your father turns up with his colleague—’
    ‘Colleague!’ said Robert. ‘She used to be a cook.’
    ‘As a matter of fact she was a colleague. As a matter of fact,’ Curran said, ‘I know something about your father’s career at Ambrose College. Mrs Tiller is your father’s mistress, naturally, but she was also his colleague, which is to say in a courteous way he preferred to style her a colleague rather than a subordinate, since she was on the staff at Ambrose. She taught cooking, an unusual experiment for a boys’ school, but successful. At first she visited three evenings a week to give lessons in cooking to five boys; and very soon her class increased to twenty-odd. When your