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‘Isn’t Mrs Jones vile? I loathe her. I just hate her to the depths of my being and want awful, disgusting things to happen to her. Is that terrible of me? I have visions of her stripped of that gaudy dress and dragged through the streets. Wasn’t she hideous tonight? I’ll have her rendition of “Let’s Fall in Love” going through my head for a week. She deserves rich punishment for that, at the very least.’

Pavel Michalowski listened to the disembodied voice coming from the speaker he had rigged up to his telephone receiver as he assessed the work he still needed to do tonight. Pavel was good with wires and technology. He had been building radios since childhood. The speaker, combined with a microphone ‘borrowed’ from the BBC, was a neat little technical l solution to the problem of staying in touch with loquacious friends and demanding clients while getting on with the task in hand.

‘You love her, admit it,’ he said, picking up a stack of bills and glancing through them. ‘You’re just jealous.’

‘Of Tony Armstrong Jones? Are you joking? The man is tiny. And outrageous. And so bourgeois.’

The voice, rich and resonant, belonged to Pavel’s friend Henry Coxon, a journalist and bon viveur. He was talking about Princess Margaret, nicknamed ‘Mrs Jones’ by Henry since her recent marriage to Pavel’s friend, Tony.

‘So are you – bourgeois at least,’ Pavel said. ‘So am I. And Tony’s talented. So’s she. The song was nice. She should do it professionally. It would do her good to try hard at something.’

‘Did you say she was good?’ Henry asked. ‘I can hardly hear you. Have you got me echoing round your house again? I hate it when you put me on the speaker.’

‘Then don’t call me when I’m catching up on work after a party.’

Henry was upset. ‘When else can I call, if not after a party? It’s the only time I have anything to say.’

‘You have nothing to say. You’re a bigger bitch than her highness.’

Henry was bitter because he’d had visions of squiring the princess himself. When her last engagement had gone wrong, he honestly thought he was in with a chance. Not of ending up at Kensington Palace, perhaps, but at least of a tale to tell his grandchildren. Instead, her amused indifference burned and baffled him. And now Pavel’s friend Tony had nabbed her.

‘Oh, that’s mean!’ he complained. ‘And it’s her royal highness. You wouldn’t know that, being foreign.’

‘I’m not foreign,’ Pavel reminded his friend, good humouredly.

‘With a name like Michalowski?’

Pavel ignored this remark. He thought back to the song, to which Margaret had adapted the lyrics. Birds do it, bees do it, Even the Navy overseas do it . . . Humming to himself, he turned to his dining table, which served as his office desk, and cast his eye over a print that had recently returned from the framer. It was a posed image, Pavel’s stock in trade: a girl in pearls, head turned three-quarters to the camera, body in a black turtleneck sweater that paid testament to the structural quality of her underwear. This particular subject wasn’t a girl, more of a proper woman, with a younger version of herself sitting beside her, hair neatly brushed and caught in a clip, staring limpidly out of the frame.

Pavel gazed at the two faces briefly before sliding the picture into its packaging and stacking it with a pile of others awaiting distribution or collection. Girls in pearls bored him to tears.

Henry was still going. ‘Of course, I’ll have to say something nice in my column on Friday. God, I hate the way we have to grovel, don’t you? It’s so outdated. They’re humans, these royals. Why can’t we just say so?’

Pavel grunted a non-committal reply.

Henry lowered his voice, but its plummy tones, rendered raspy by a forty-a-day cigarette habit, still filled the room.