He must have her. He must have her, or someone else. He needed contact, skin to skin, muscle to muscle. Above all, he needed the oblivious moment of penetration when, for a second, he could stop thinking about himself. Unless, as too often happened, the appearance of intimacy unleashed a further disembodiment and a deeper privacy. Never mind that. Even if sex sentenced him to an exile which, on top of the usual melancholy, contained the additional irritation of another person’s dumb reproach, the conquest was bound to be exhilarating. Or was it? Who was left to him? Beautiful women were always with someone, unless you happened to catch them in the split second between inconsolable loss and consolation, or in the taxi that was taking them from their principal lover to one of the secondary ones. And if you had a beautiful woman, they always kept you waiting, kept you doubting, because it was the only time they could be sure that you were thinking about them.

Having worked himself up into a state of some bitterness, Patrick strode over to the bar.

‘Jack Daniel’s on the rocks,’ he said to the barman. As he drew back, Patrick checked the girl to his left. She was slightly plump, dark-haired, and marginally pretty. She looked back at him steadily, a good sign.

‘Aren’t you hot in that coat?’ she asked. ‘It is May, you know.’

‘Incredibly hot,’ Patrick admitted with a half-smile, ‘but I’d feel flayed without it.’

‘It’s like a defence mechanism,’ said the girl.

‘Yes,’ drawled Patrick, feeling that she had not captured the full subtlety and poignancy of his overcoat. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked as casually as possible.

‘Rachel.’

‘Mine’s Patrick. Can I offer you a drink?’ Christ, he sounded like a parody of someone making conversation. Everything had taken on a threatening or facetious aspect that made it harder than ever to climb down from the position of an observer. Perhaps she would experience the crushing dullness as a reassuring ritual.

‘Sure. I’d like a beer. A Dos Equis.’

‘Fine,’ said Patrick, catching the barman’s attention. ‘So what kind of work do you do?’ he went on, practically vomiting at the effort of making ordinary conversation and feigning an interest in somebody else.

‘I work in a gallery.’

‘Really?’ said Patrick, hoping he sounded impressed. He seemed to have lost all control over his voice.

‘Yeah, but I really wanna start a gallery of my own.’

Here we go again, thought Patrick. The waiter who thinks he’s an actor, the actor who thinks he’s a director, the taxi driver who thinks he’s a philosopher. All the signs are good at this point, the deal is about to happen, there’s a lot of interest from the record companies . . . a city full of phoney aggressive fantasists and, of course, a few genuinely unpleasant people with power.

‘Only, I need the financial backing,’ she sighed.