‘I can’t,’ squeaked Taggie. ‘I’ve got someone here.’

‘Well get rid of them. Annabel, my date, has been out all day with the Belvoir, and the snow’s too bad for her to drive down, and anyway, she’s bushed. So I’ve got no one to go with and I can’t think of anyone more delicious than you.’

‘I haven’t got anything to wear.’

‘Fret not, I’ll be over in an hour with some frocks.’

‘I’ve been asked to the Hunt Ball,’ said Taggie in awe.

‘Wonderful,’ said Hazel excitedly. ‘I’ll dog-sit. Go and wash your hair and have a bath. I’ll make you up. You’ll come up beautifully.’

Bas, naughty as his word, arrived an hour later with a back seat loaded up with ball dresses.

‘Where did you get them?’ asked Taggie incredulously.

‘Corinium’s wardrobe department,’ said Bas. ‘Their security is atrocious.’

‘What a gorgeous man,’ murmured Hazel enviously, ‘and I’ve had some heart-throbs through my fingers in my time.’

‘This dress is made by B-A-L-Main,’ spelt out Taggie slowly. ‘What happens if I put my foot through it?’

‘Try the crimson one,’ said Bas. ‘It’s much the best colour for you and at least it won’t show up the red wine that’s bound to get poured over you.’

‘It’s awfully low-cut,’ said Taggie dubiously.

‘All the better,’ said Hazel, checking the Carmen rollers. ‘Hurry up and decide. I want to do your hair.’

Back at the ball, dinner was over and dancing had begun. It was a measure of Monica’s niceness that no one else but she knew that Valerie had auditioned and been turned down for both Maud and Monica’s parts in The Merry Widow. Still smarting from the rejection (she would have been so much better than Maud), Valerie was now determined to demonstrate her dancing skills and had dragged a reluctant Freddie on to the floor. She was soon bawling him out.

‘Can’t you concentrate for one minute, Fred-Fred? I said fish-tail not telemarque.’

Through a swirling herbaceous border of red coats and brilliantly coloured dresses, Freddie could see Lizzie in fuchsia pink being humped round the floor by James, who’d at last managed to shake off Sarah.

As they passed Tony sitting at the Corinium table, James deliberately pressed his cheek and his body against Lizzie’s.

I can’t stand it, thought Lizzie wretchedly. She’d imagined it would be better seeing Freddie tonight, than not seeing him at all, but it made everything much, much worse.

Watching across the room, Freddie wanted to punch James on his perfectly straight nose, and then whisk Lizzie upstairs on to a moth-infested four-poster and tear off her fuchsia dress and kiss her all over.

‘Fred-Fred,’ screeched Valerie in his ear, ‘are you tipsy? This is a foxtrot.’

Declan danced with Maud, who was well away. Over his shoulder she glanced at her gold watch. Bas was very late. At the Venturer table it was plain to Cameron, watching Rupert pour another large whisky, that he was deliberately setting out to get drunk. People kept pausing to say hullo, but, seeing the set expression on his face and the sinister glitter in his eyes, they didn’t stay long. Cameron, acutely conscious of Tony two tables away talking in lowered tones to Ginger Johnson and watching her every move, tried to talk to Rupert. A slow anger rose in her when he only answered in monosyllables.

Why make it so obvious that you’ve absolutely no interest in me, she wanted to scream. Was he deliberately goading her to go back to Tony?

‘The next dance is definitely mine,’ said Henry to Cameron.

‘Oh, good. Here’s Bas at last,’ said Maud, pinning up a tendril of hair at the back.

‘Good Lord,’ said Henry in wonder, his glass of wine poised halfway to his lips. ‘What a stunning girl!’

‘Annabel Kemble-Taylor’s hardly a girl,’ said Rupert, who had his back to the floor. ‘Half Leicestershire’s been up her.’

‘She is pretty. Most dramatical,’ said Freddie, putting on his spectacles. ‘Blimey, it’s Taggie.’

Rupert swung round and caught his breath. There, undulating across the floor, rouged, lipsticked, her eyes vast and black-lined with kohl, black hair a mass of snakey ringlets, her shoulders, far creamier and lusher than Maud’s, rising out of a ruched crimson dress with a bustle, was indeed Taggie. Everyone was turning round to gawp at her. Basil, who’d been slowly stalking her for fourteen months, looked beside himself with pride.

‘You look like a Christmas cracker,’ he whispered in her ear, as he fingered the ruched dress, ‘and, my God, I can’t wait to pull you.’

Taggie giggled. She was slightly overwhelmed by how different Hazel had made her look and the sensation she seemed to be creating. Her only aim was to please Rupert. She wanted to show him that she had at last grown up. But as he stared at her, his face totally unsmiling, her courage failed and she gave the dress a desperate tug upwards. Then, just as she and Bas reached the Venturer table, the band started again.

‘Lady in Red,’ said Basil in delight. ‘How appropriate.’ And, taking Taggie’s bag from her and dropping it in front of Rupert in a curiously insolent gesture, he swept her onto the floor.

‘I can’t dance,’ pleaded Taggie, half-laughing. ‘I truly, truly can’t.’

‘You can with me,’ said Bas, putting his hand round her waist. ‘This is a nice slow one to start with. This song could have been written for you, you are so so beautiful. ‘Never seen you looking so lovely as you do tonight,’ he sang, never seen you shine so bright.’

‘I find all this lipstick a bit strange,’ said Taggie.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll kiss it all off later.’

Taggie blushed. He was at least five inches taller than her, and so supple and strong, and with such a Latin sense of rhythm, that Taggie was soon following him perfectly in time.

‘You dance beautifully,’ he said, laying his cheek against her hair.

‘I can do it,’ said Taggie excitedly. ‘I can really dance.’

‘The lady in red is dancing with me, sang Bas gazing deep into her eyes, ‘There’s nobody here, just you and me.’ What a good thing Annabel had such an exhausting day with the Belvoir.’

‘Lady in red, Lady in red,’ sang Taggie dreamily and tunelessly, not knowing any of the other words. ‘It is a most gorgeous song.’

‘And you’re the most gorgeous girl,’ said Basil, french-kissing her shoulder.

‘Very fast man across country, Bas,’ said Henry approvingly.

‘Very fast man on the dance floor,’ said Freddie. ‘Don’t they go well togevver?’

Maud was looking extremely wintry. Cameron was watching Rupert. His face was like marble, but the tendons on the back of his hand, which was clenched round his glass, were like underground cables. He never took his eyes off Taggie as she and Bas moved round the floor. Then, suddenly, as the music stopped and Bas bent his otter-sleek head and kissed Taggie on her crimson mouth, his hand tightened on the glass so convulsively that it shattered. Amazingly he didn’t cut himself, but there was glass everywhere.

‘My Auntie was so superstitious,’ said Valerie, as a waitress rushed in with a dustpan and brush, ‘that if she broke something precious she’d rush down to the bottom of the garden and smash two jam jars to break the run of bad luck.’

‘As Rupert’s heart’s just been broken as well,’ said Cameron viciously, ‘we only need smash one more thing.’

‘Shut up,’ snarled Rupert, pouring a slug of whisky into a nearby wine glass.

Declan shot him a warning look. Nor were matters improved by Bas arriving at the table with Taggie.

‘Haven’t I done well?’ he said smugly. ‘Annabel dropped out, so the understudy took her place. I knew you’d be pleased, Maud darling,’ he added blithely as he bent down to peck Maud’s gritted cheek. ‘You were just complaining yesterday Taggie never had any fun.’

‘You look absolutely perfick,’ said Freddie.

‘Where did that gown come from?’ asked Valerie accusingly.

‘Corinium wardrobe department,’ said Basil, lobbing Freddie’s roll at Georgie Baines at the next table. ‘Suits her, doesn’t it?’

‘She looks great,’ said Declan proudly. ‘But make sure it isn’t bugged.’

‘All the bug would pick up is the hammering of her heart because she’s with me,’ said Bas, squeezing Taggie’s hand.

Taggie glanced shyly across at Rupert, who was now looking at her with complete indifference. Suddenly she felt utterly deflated. Even with every stop pulled out, there was no way she could win him. But there was little time to fret. Next minute a thoroughly over-excited Henry had whisked her off to dance. They were just circling decorously when the band broke into ‘Rock around the Clock’.

‘Ha ha ha,’ said Henry, suddenly galvanized like an over-adrenalized tarantula. ‘I know this tune. There’s life in the old dog yet.’ And he flung Taggie across the floor with great energy.

Every time he twirled her round he nearly pulled her out of her cracker dress. He’ll discover a paper hat and a motto in a minute, she thought as she frantically tugged it up again. As soon as the band stopped, a young blood swooped and asked her to dance, and then another, and another. Each one took her telephone number and said they’d ring her.

Great excitement, because it was regarded as highly symbolic, was caused at the Corinium table when Tony won a portable television on the Tombola.

‘He won’t be needing that much longer,’ growled Declan, who was getting increasingly worried about Rupert.

Freddie had also vanished, ostensibly to fetch Valerie some lemon squash, but he’d been away for three-quarters of an hour, and James Vereker could be seen hunting everywhere for Lizzie as he tried to escape from Sarah. Bas claimed another dance with Taggie and persuaded the band to play ‘Lady in Red’ again. As he and Taggie danced past them, all the band stood up in salute to her beauty.