Chapter Ten
The Fall of the Emerald
1
As I think of that wretched night of the children’s party there will be two pictures that cross my mind. The first, of a group of brightly coloured people, for we were in white flannels and the women in those mad, barbaric colours which fashion, goaded on by Chanel and gallantly led by Captain Molyneux, has lately flung as a challenge to our dark civilisation, around a table lit by the cameo flames rising from eight tall cast candlesticks by Paul Lamarie; and I remember that in the still air of Guy’s great, bare dining-room those cameo flames never flickered even so much, they might have been flowers of light cut out of the stifling heat.
The second picture is of a darkness. A darkness torn here and there by the sudden flame of a match which drove
