Joe looked a little startled when I walked into the restaurant hand in hand with a five-year-old child

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 211. 

Soon, however, it became all too clear not only that the rebels were digging themselves in but that the contagion was rapidly spreading across the Middle East. In Syria, Jordan, and particularly in Iraq, the tension rose; soon afterwards the American Sixth Fleet appeared off the Lebanese coast. In the western embassies there was much discussion of whether wives and families should be evacuated. Probably rightly as it turned out, the order was never given; and to some extent at least daytime life continued in much the same old way. We could still have our Saturday or Sunday picnics, as long as we chose safe areas to have them in; we could still go down to the beach and swim. But the curfew meant that social life was very largely at an end; instead of going out to dinner parties people read books, and lunchtime conversation grew steadily more intellectual as a result. And even those lunchtimes could be disrupted. On one occasion the American journalist Joe Alsop, passing through Beirut, had invited me to lunch at the Saint-Georges Hotel; just before I left my desk Artemis’s school telephoned to say that fighting had broken out in the south of the city and that the school bus, unable to get up to our house, was dropping her off with me at the Embassy. Clearly there was nothing for it but to bring her to lunch too. Joe looked a little startled when I walked into the restaurant hand in hand with a five-year-old child, but he rose magnificently to the occasion and gave her one of the largest ice creams I have ever seen.