In excellent fettle, in the pink or the blue of boyish good health during their absence, Marmaduke sickened dramatically within a few hours of their return. Evenhandedly he dabbled with every virus, every hatching, afforded by that early spring. Recovering from mumps, he reacted catastrophically to his final whooping-cough shot. Superflu followed superflu in efficient relay. Doctors now visited him, unasked and unpaid, out of sheer professional curiosity. At this point, and for no clear reason (Sir Oliver asked if he might write a paper about it), Marmaduke's health radically improved. Indeed, he seemed to shed his sickly self as if it were a dead skin or a useless appendage: from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a musclebound wunder-kind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious. The change was all very sudden. Guy and Hope went out one day, leaving the usual gastroenteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchen floor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets, watched by several speechless nannies. He had never crawled. Instead, he appeared to have worked it out that he could cause much more trouble, and have much more fun, in a state of peak fitness. His first move was to dispense with that midnight nap. The Clinches hired more help, or they tried. An ailing baby was one thing; a strappingly malevolent toddler was quite another. Up until now, Guy and Hope's relationship, to the child and to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke's renaissance, it became, well — you wouldn't say paramilitary. You'd say military. The only people they could get who stayed longer than an hour or two were male nurses sacked from lunatic asylums, Around the house, these days there was a kind of swat team of burly orderlies, as well as a few scarred nannies and au pairs. Dazedly yet without bit­terness, Guy calculated that Marmaduke, now in his ninth month, had already cost him a quarter of a million pounds. They went away again.