Kay lived in a rented flat on the outskirts of Oxford, where she played the violin, kept cats, and worked on her Kafka thesis. She took a less complacent attitude towards Patrick’s idleness than anyone else he knew. ‘You have to sell yourself,’ she used to say, ‘just to get rid of the damned thing.’

Patrick disliked everything about Kay’s flat. He knew she had not put the gold cherubs against the William Morris-styled wallpaper; on the other hand, she had not taken them down. In the dark corridor, Kay had come up to him, her thick brown hair falling on one shoulder, and her body draped in heavy grey silk. She had kissed him slowly, while her jealous cats scratched at the kitchen door.

Patrick had drunk the whisky and taken the Valium she had given him. Kay told him about her own dying parents. ‘You have to start looking after them badly before you’ve got over the shock of how badly they looked after you,’ she said. ‘I had to drive my parents across the States last summer. My dad was dying of emphysema and my mother, who used to be a ferocious woman, was like a child after her stroke. I was barrelling along at eighty through Utah, looking for a bottle of oxygen, while my mother kept saying with her impoverished vocabulary, “Oh dear, oh my, Papa’s not well. Oh my.” ’

Patrick imagined Kay’s father sunk in the back of the car, his eyes glazed over with exhaustion and his lungs, like torn fishing nets, trawling vainly for air. How had his own father died? He had forgotten to ask.

Since his luminous remarks about ‘that mental thing’, Earl had been speaking about his ‘whole variety of holdings’ and his love for his family. His divorce had been ‘hard on the kids’, but he concluded with a chuckle, ‘I’ve been diversifying, and I don’t just mean in the business field.’

Patrick was grateful to be flying on Concorde. Not only would he be fresh for the ordeal of seeing his father’s corpse, before it was cremated the next day, but he was also halving his conversation time with Earl. They ought to advertise. A simpering voiceover popped into his mind: ‘It’s because we care, not just for your physical comfort, but for your mental health, that we shorten your conversation with people like Earl Hammer.’

‘You see, Paddy,’ said Earl, ‘I’ve made very considerable – I mean big – contributions to the Republican Party, and I could get just about any embassy I want. But I’m not interested in London or Paris: that’s just social shit.’

Patrick drank his brandy in one gulp.

‘What I want is a small Latin American or Central American country where the ambassador has control of the CIA on the ground.’

‘On the ground,’ echoed Patrick.