Saul and Lucy and the rest of the team were his consiglieri as he laid claim to the crucial neighbourhood of human endeavour known as science, so often neglected by the billionaire community in favour of art, animals, opera, Mars, orphans and famous diseases. It was hard to make a splash when Bill Gates already had malaria and the Metropolitan Museum was growing more philanthropic wings than a mutant fruit fly, but he had endowed a Foundation devoted to finding scientific solutions to the world’s manifold problems. The trouble was that whenever he came across a good idea it somehow ended up in Digitas. Still, for a man as rich as him to show his face in society without a Foundation would be like a construction worker not having a hard hat on a building site. At the dinner party where he had met Lucy, he had mentioned his Foundation, quite casually, only to have her say, ‘To a foreign eye, America has so much philanthropy and so little charity. Most people have to kill themselves to prove that they deserve ordinary kindness, while a tiny group of people never stop boasting about how generous they are – as long as it’s tax-deductible.’ That’s when he’d decided to hire her.

Eight minutes left and he was beginning to feel the encroachment of that old catastrophe: comedown. He glanced up at Jimmy Carter (it was his turn) but realised it was too late to organise himself and he would screw up the call. Punctuality and control mattered to him immensely – perhaps because part of him was so out of control. He had been living this way since he was a teenager; now only in occasional bursts, but with the threat always there in the background. When he had first become vaguely aware of Saul at Princeton, Hunter invariably wrote his essays through the night, just before they were due. The exchange rate was about twenty lines of writing for one line of coke; writing that started out with declamatory confidence and degenerated into convoluted confusion. He must stop. It was no way to carry on for a man in his late forties, but despite all the therapy, there was something he couldn’t reach, a bomb he hadn’t disposed of, a part of him that wanted to smash everything up. He thought of using these last painful minutes to check the stock market on his phone, or check the schedule Jade emailed him each morning, but instead he glazed over, looking bleakly at the perfection of his surroundings until the digits on his clock finally flicked to the right number. He punched his fist into the palm of his other hand and brought himself back before he tapped Lucy’s number.

‘Lucy! How are you doing?’

‘Hi, Hunter! I’m loving your flat. Are you looking forward to your visit?’