If David had nothing more to learn than that long-ago lesson of giving in, he needed now only the patience to experience the process of giving out. He did not much regret the fading sight and sound of a city so changed from his boyhood that he no longer felt at home in it, but, as he turned to retrace his steps, the pain in his shoulder which should have encouraged the mortal direction of his thoughts felt more like a lively protest.

He could no longer report it to Patricia, who would administer to or dismiss in her judgment. Not even his body, never mind his life, had been in his own hands for years. He looked at those hands, steady and articulate even now but with that old reluctance which could build to fear if he had to direct anything.

Another body brushed against his: ‘Watch where you’re going, you old beggar.’

David, startled, looked down at his old raincoat which Patricia might have by now told him to throw out, and he knew his hat wasn’t in much better shape. But ‘old beggar’? Surely he didn’t look as disreputable as that. He supposed without much effort he could.

His tongue touched the roof of his mouth and nudged the upper plate out of place. With it in his pocket, he had a partially toothless grin, and consonants would only softly form and slur at their escape. He next removed his glasses, to which his hearing aid was attached. The sound of traffic disappeared. He heard no footfalls of approaching pedestrians, and the traffic lights blurred into their larger auras. Finally he let his stance accommodate the pain in his shoulder, hunched up against his ear.

Now all he needed was to pick the right victim, one of the Teds of this world, and with just the balance of cringing aggression ask for, well, a five, trusting that the street kid had sized up the current market.

‘I need a five, son,’ he said to a man young enough to have been a son, well but casually dressed, who paused, reached into his pocket and handed David a two-dollar bill. ‘Much obliged.’

Halfway down the block, David stepped into the shadow of a doorway to replace his teeth and glasses and to file his begged bill in his wallet, trying not to laugh aloud. But, restored to himself, he felt suddenly self-conscious. Mary should have told him not to go out looking like a skid row bum. But he was really no business of Mary’s. He intended not to be. And he couldn’t tell her, as he could never have told Patricia, about what he had just done. They would think him demented, unable to understand his comic sense of triumph.

‘Don’t play the fool,’ his mother used to say to him.