They sipped the wine that a waiter poured with practised elegance, laughed at Julian's attempts to engage the young man's eyes, scoffed at his judgement that the waiter was gay, ‘and available’ . Then they lapsed into a placid silence, captivated, like Julian before them, by the water-sprinkler's exactitude. The waiter came back.

‘Is that your car, sir, the blue Land Rover?’

‘Why, yes.’

‘You've left your lights on, sir.’

‘I hate you,’ Julian said, in a playful, teasing tone that brought a frown to Silas's face. His mood had not yet softened enough to accept Julian's coquettish behaviour (‘Camp, it is called camp’ , Julian would educate him later). Silas secretly preferred the quiet, if acerbic, Julian that he knew, always logical, always restrained. Julian stumbled off, his body losing the leisurely grace with which he had greeted them. The spell was broken, the voices of other luncheon patrons (Crucible did not have ‘customers’ , the waiter would tell them) intruded, the scrape of cutlery on china, the clink of glasses, chairs being dragged across the terracotta floor. Somewhere a man laughed, a woman's voice coyly deflected what Silas imagined was an advance. From inside the restaurant, darkened to his sun-blinded eyes, a babble of voices erupted, musical, voluptuous. The season of celebration was upon them, the year-end letting go of cares and worries, a country ready to allow the spent year to ebb out of them.

How much inhibition would be lost in the heady surge of laughter, the flow of wine, how many infidelities were being shaped here today, Silas wondered? He felt a sudden wave of resentment at these nominally joyous people, at the recklessness of their petty hedonism. Julian was back, complaining that they had warned him too late, the battery in his car was flat, but what did that matter, there was wine to be drunk and – ‘Why are we here again?’

Suddenly, Silas was glad for Julian, his gangly presence, his forbidding irreverence, his own innate despairing, even. He dispersed some of the inexplicable revulsion Silas had been feeling lately at the mere thought of embracing arms and sweaty bodies.

‘We're here to plan Silas's birthday party, remember?’ Kate said.

‘It's fifty, is it?’ Julian asked.

Then he rocked back in his chair and, balancing precariously on its two steel legs, recited a poem:

Half past twelve.

How quickly time has passed

Since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp…

He paused, peered at his two companions through half-shut eyes.

‘You know the poem?’

‘No,’ Kate said.

A familiar cadence of words, precise in its intermittence, like jets of water caught in the afternoon sun. But no, Silas could not identify the poem or the poet. Julian, quietly triumphant in his superior knowledge of literature, continued to recite, his voice perfectly modulated; this was obviously a well-loved and often-repeated verse. He finished with a flourish:

Half past twelve.

How the hours have passed.

Half past twelve.

How the years have passed.