Amsterdam

Over several years Clive seemed to race through two childless marriages relatively unscathed.

Vernon Halliday said. He had lived with her for a year in Paris in ’74, when he had his first job with Reuters and Molly did something or other for Vogue.

Clive Linley had known Molly first, back when they were students in ’68 and lived together in a chaotic, shifting household in the Vale of Health.

Molly, restaurant critic, gorgeous wit, and photographer, the daring gardener, who had been loved by the foreign secretary and could still turn a perfect cartwheel at the age of forty-six.

Clive is Britain’s most successful modern composer, and Vernon is editor of the newspaper The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister.

Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly’s lovers

it was the music, the wondrous transformation of thought into sound.

to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.

then he took his third glass of Bandol for a wander about the house, an anthropologist to his own existence.

“love is greater than spite.”