Harry’s mother and aunts called these little parties ‘madcap afternoons’, the term used to describe them during their youth, in their native city. Whenever they asked: ‘Would you do us the honour of coming to our madcap afternoon with your daughter on the Seventeenth?’, people found a certain exotic, old-fashioned charm in such an invitation. (Years of living in France had not blotted out their foreign accent, but had refashioned it: they no longer rolled their ‘r’s the way Russians normally did, but pronounced them more gutturally, which gave a strange Parisian sound to their extremely refined, polite, delightful phrases.) Some even called it ‘Slavic charm’, in the most well-meaning way. At eight o’clock, the hum of voices coming from the large green reception room where the buffet was set up grew much softer. Suddenly, fragments of conversation or a particular laugh were clearly audible where, a quarter of an hour earlier, there had merely been the noise of a hundred voices, footsteps and music.
