It’s a silly, chippy complex, I know, but I often feel, on the rare occasions that I am induced to attend a lunch or dinner party, that I don’t belong. This truth or delusion occasionally overwhelms me and I sit there, paralysed, unhappy and silent. It’s a pity. Today we were six for Sunday lunch and so far — apart from knocking over the coatstand, twice, during what one would have thought to be the simple act of hanging a jacket on one of the hooks, and breaking it in two — so good. The chap seated to my left — by a very surprising and agreeable coincidence, given that only the week before I had for the first time in my life read a collection of Sir Max Beerbohm’s marvellous essays —turned out to be the ‘Incomparable Max’s’ brother’s grandson, still proudly bearing the illustrious name down into the present day.
As we ate, conversation was sometimes local, sometimes general. The raised subject of Boris Nemtsov’s assassination in Moscow provoked a free-for-all debate about whether Putin was directly responsible. Had the Russian president — a ‘moderate’ the experts tell us — perhaps popped out of the Kremlin for a moment, pulled the trigger himself and dramatically fled the scene in a getaway car? With a face like that, we thought, you wouldn’t put it past him.
Our host had been marvellous about his busted coatstand, roaring with laughter and saying, ‘I love it! Don’t you just love it? Isn’t it gorgeous!’ He was a foreign news correspondent, veteran of both the vicious Chechen wars, Bosnia and Iraq One. Serious for a moment, his considered opinion was that Putin had not ordered the political assassination, but rather that some unknown enthusiast had assumed that potting Mr Nemtsov was all in a good cause and that when Mr Putin heard about it he would be dancing around on the tips of his toes.
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