a later Spark and a pretty good one. There’s a passing reference to AIDS and one of the opening quotes is ‘the affair ended in wounds and the party was finally broken up by the shedding of blood’. So squint and you could maybe wonder of part if this was about AIDS… but there’s nothing so obvious as a metaphor and even when death seems to follow one particular character, that’s all sketched in with Sparkian allusions to the supernatural, coincidence and comic misjudgment.