Daniel remained in the middle of the room, holding forth. Charles let him run on in the hope that a sermon before dinner would prevent a sermon during it. During the ensuing ten minutes they covered the 1953 removal by Britain and America of the popular Iranian government and the installation of the Shah, and then Suez, before reverting to the 1948 founding of Israel by Western powers anxious to assuage their guilt over Christian and fascist responsibility for what they called the Holocaust, which they continued to exaggerate in order to justify the usurper Israel. They also touched on Western responsibility for Iraq and Syria, Western indifference to the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya, Western tolerance of pornography and of vile mocking films and cartoons of the Prophet in Denmark and Holland and of the persecution of innocent Muslims under iniquitous counter-terrorism legislation introduced since 9/11.

Charles, having listened in silence, thought he may as well go the whole hog and confirm what he suspected. ‘Yes, 9/11.’ He shook his head. ‘Who do you think was responsible?’

Daniel was holding his glass in both hands now, as if it were an offering. ‘The Jews and the CIA.’

They searched each other’s eyes for a moment, Charles for any flicker of irony and Daniel, he suspected, for signs of hostility and resistance. ‘More elderflower?’

Dinner was easier than the preliminaries had threatened. Akela was quiet, answering questions but initiating nothing. She was a civil servant in the Department for Education and looked forward to leaving when they started a family, which she spoke of as a foregone conclusion. She ate little of the vegetarian lasagne that Sarah had spent the previous evening preparing. It was hard to imagine that she and her ebullient lawyer sister had much in common.

Daniel, having got his ideology off his chest, proved happy to engage on subjects other than the Single Narrative. They discussed his carpentering and the pleasures and pains of self-employment in southwest London. Once or twice he veered back towards the ideological but Charles was able to distract him from a full sermon by generalising about the Single Narratives of other cultures and countries, such as the Russian version of the Second World War and the Cold War, the Irish Republican passion for grievance and the benign history of the British Empire that he had grown up with.