And she’s off again, and while others eager for their turn might be annoyed, Andrew is not: keep the other person talking, is his tried-and-true solution. Although the best solution is to avoid these situations altogether. Usually he tells his hosts he’ll need to dash off after a lecture, but it’s a challenge to come up with a prior engagement when an invitation is issued months in advance.

The foyer is crowded; he expects the post-lecture conviviality is as much of a drawcard as the lecture itself. The cheese and cabana disappeared quickly, but the wine, donated by one of the sponsors of the lecture series, is in good supply. There’s a jostling of bodies, a clamour of voices, wafts of powder and perfume, and from his height advantage, a bobbing of bald heads and neat grey hairstyles.

One of the larger groups is congregated around him, and now that Ravenna woman has finally been elbowed aside, a lively chatter ensues. Everyone is having a good time, yet all he wants is to be out of here. Though that’s not correct: he wants to be here, in this room with these people, but he wants to be enjoying himself, and not crushed by this utterly useless self-consciousness.

‘I am all thumbs at life,’ Rilke, favourite poet and life companion, wrote. I am too, Andrew intones silently.

He manoeuvres himself into his out-of-body experience, a private and reasonably reliable device he has never mentioned to anyone for fear of being judged crazy. And it seems to be working. He hears his voice — he sounds quite sensible — and he sees himself from a distance, a man who looks to be at ease, a man at the centre of a group and in control of the situation. He just needs to maintain this for a few minutes longer, but a woman intrudes with an unexpected question, and wrenches him back into his own wretched body.

He knows these toils of his are camouflaged, that others see a reserved, slightly bashful man — the sort of demeanour one would expect of an artist. He knows his tomato face is ascribed to the heat in the room, and any hesitancy in his speech is attributed to his being a considered and thoughtful conversationalist. But knowing he is alone in his agony does not lessen it, not one bit. O to be mellow. O to acquire the gift of mellowness.

‘It strikes me as curious,’ the woman is saying, ‘that the anti-religion Soviets would be spending a fortune on restoring the Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood.’