"You don't disapprove?" asked Stella, watching him watching them.
"Me? No." Alex held up his beer and squinted at the label.
"Personally I'd rather go this way than that way, but .. ." He shrugged.
"Each to his own?"
Alex looked over at the powder-nosed models.
"Or her own.
The kitchen was filling up. Stella introduced Alex to a film director named Danny Biggs, for whose latest project she was designing costumes.
"What's the picture going to be about?" Alex asked.
"Bunch of geezers turning over a bank," said Danny.
"Working title "Hair of the Dog"."
"Why do you need a fashion designer to dress bank robbers?" Alex asked him.
"Most villains I've come across are fat, middle-aged white men in dodgy gold jewellery and knocked-off sports gear the sort of stuff you can pick up in any high street."
"Well, we 'ave to improve on reality," explained Danny.
"Dress 'em in ruffled shirts an' Gucci whistles."
At that moment Jamie appeared with the Prada girl and touched fists with Stella.
"You'd better watch out," he told her, indicating Alex.
"This man gave us a lecture, yesterday on ambushes and surprise attacks.
Keep him in view at all times!"
Stella raised an eyebrow.
"I thought you were one of the... what do you call them, students? Cadets?"
"I am," said Alex.
"But I came up through the ranks for ten years first, hence my advanced age. From time to time us old lags get called on to address the Ruperts that's Jamie and his friends and pass on a few dirty tricks."
"Dirty tricks, eh?" mused Stella.
"Sounds interesting." As Jamie and the Prada girl exited with their drinks, Sophie reappeared.
Alex's heart thumped in his chest. She was beautiful, he realised, and beautiful in a much more interesting way than the models, with their stick-thin limbs and their dim, drug-dazed faces.
"Hey, girlfriend!" Stella greeted Sophie.
"Look who's still here!"
As Sophie met Alex's eye, the beginnings of a smile touched the corners of her mouth.
"Well! I thought we'd shocked you into flight."
Alex attempted an answering smile.
"I don't scare quite as easily as you think," he said.
At the draining board the anxious-looking model was rubbing the last of the cocaine into her gums.
Stella rolled her eyes at the girl.
"Tash, you should cool it with that stuff. I don't want you falling off the catwalk tomorrow."
"I know, Stell. I've just been like, so busy, yeah? I got this option for the new Virginity campaign and everyone at the agency's like hey, you really gotta do this, they're like really big clients and I'm like whoa, cool it, yeah? I just want to, like, chill out, y'know?"
"I know," said Stella gently. She turned to Sophie.
"Dad was asking how you were.
"Tell him fine," said Sophie.
"What does your dad do?" Alex asked Stella on impulse.
"He's a musician," said Stella.
"He used to play bass guitar with a band in the Sixties. And he still does a bit of song writing
Alex nodded.
"My dad's into cars. That's his thing."
He turned to Sophie.
"What about you? How's your old man fill his time?"
"He sells what he calls area-denial systems and the rest of the world calls land mines said Sophie.
"Mostly to third-world dictators. That's his thing."
Alex nodded again. This was clearly sensitive territory.
"And is business, er, good?" he ventured.
"Booming," said Sophie drily.
They looked at each other for a moment.
"Before you disappear," said Stella, "I've just had a thought. Why don't you and this nice young man come to dinner at my place tomorrow night?"
Sophie gazed into Alex's eyes. Her grey-green gaze poured over him like a wave.
"That would be lovely," she said quietly.
"Are you free?"
"Yes," said Alex.
"Good." Sophie kissed him softly but firmly on the mouth.
"See you there."
Alex watched her go. Stella watched him watch her.
"Smitten, I'd say." She smiled.
"Definitely smitten."
"Who?" asked Alex, smiling like an idiot.
"You tell me." Stella bent and rummaged in her bag.
"Here, I'll give you the address for tomorrow night."
She wrote it on the back of an invitation to a film premiere.
"Be there," she told him sternly.
"I'm counting on you, OK?"
"I promise," said Alex.
Ten minutes later he was walking down Sloane Street with Jamie who after a promising start had seen the Prada girl stolen away from him by the film director Danny Biggs.
"He told her he grew up hanging around the dog tracks and nicking cars," protested the disconsolate Jamie.
"The truth is that he went to Eton with me and his father's the Lord-Lieutenant of Shropshire.
Bastard."
"I'm afraid all's fair in love and war, mate," Alex told him.
"No prizes for second place."
"I guess not," Jamie agreed gloomily.
They walked on in silence for a few paces.
"By the way," said Alex, a little self-consciously, 'it looks like I'm seeing your sister tomorrow night' he checked his watch - "I mean tonight. Forum dinner."
"Oh, yeah?" said Jamie, amused at Alex's embarrassment.
"Glad you came, then?"
"I guess I am."
The next day Alex spent the afternoon at the Duke of York's Headquarters in the King's Road, test-firing revolvers with Dave Constantine. Wondering if he should dress smartly for dinner at Stella's perhaps even buy some new clothes he had eventually ditched the idea and stuck to his jeans and a T-shirt.
In the evening he took the tube to Notting Hill Gate and walked northwards up Ladbroke Grove. Stella's flat was on the first floor of a vast white wedding cake of a Victorian house and overlooked a private garden.
From a dark staircase he walked into a huge room flooded with pale evening light. Several floor-to ceiling windows had been opened outwards on to an ironwork balcony, in front of which Stella and a guy with dark hair and a lazy smile were sitting at a table drinking champagne.
"Alex," said Stella.
"Hey. You made it!"
"I did," agreed Alex.
Trying to recall the event afterwards, he discovered there were gaps in his memory. He couldn't remember what Stella's boyfriend did it might have been something to do with the music industry, or possibly with TV, but then again it could have been advertising or PR and he couldn't remember anything that they ate or drank or talked about at the long table in front of the balcony. For Alex, this was one hell of a lot of information to forget in a short space of time but he didn't really give a damn because everything to do with Sophie her skin, her hair, her smell, the way she moved etched itself deeply and permanently into his consciousness.
She amazed him. There were her clothes, for a start electric blue and, presumably, vastly expensive which lent her the sheen of an exotic bird. And then there was her slender, delicately rounded body, and the limitless candour of her wave-green eyes. But more than her appearance there was her manner, her almost reckless confidence. Most women Alex had met up to that moment had seemed to watch themselves, to monitor their appearance and the impression that they were making minute by minute.
Not Sophie. Sophie didn't seem to give a damn. There was a huge mirror on one wall of the twilit room and though she passed it a score of times Alex never saw her glance into it once. She was just there, beautiful if you chose to think so and if not, well, who cared?
Alex chose to think so. He was entranced and the thing that really got him the thing that really ducked under his guard -was that she seemed to be as entranced as he was. She just stared at him, quite openly, fascinated.