‘Are you that absent-minded?’ Ronald said with a laugh.

‘Not as a rule. But right now your cousin has me so distracted I barely know what I’m doing!’ Simon added, though he had not intended to. ‘There’s a strong resemblance between you and Marianne, by the way.’

‘So we’ve always been told. But her hair isn’t yet pure silver!’

‘Mine was getting there when I met her, and she’s sure as hell now speeding it on its way,’ Simon declared after gulping down his Scotch. ‘Why am I telling you this?’

‘Could be you need to tell someone and I happen to be her cousin and handy. Marianne, bless her heart, isn’t a woman many guys would find easy to live with.’

‘We’re not living together. I’ve asked her to marry me.’

‘And she’s struggling to hang on to her independence?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘I’ve known her all my life, haven’t I? Too much independence has always been her trouble, though I reckon the guy she married in her youth learned to live with it. Ralph was a terrific person. An artist who never made it but didn’t let that sour him.’

Simon’s first intimation of the similarity between himself and the man whose replacement he wanted to be. If you didn’t count that Ralph hadn’t let disappointment sour him!

He glanced around at the happy-hour throng in the bar. ‘Yuppie’ described most of them. Young executives, male and female, and some not so young, uniformed in the slick suits that went with their workaday scene. A sprinkling too of those for whom cocktails at the Plaza or wherever was a nightly ritual of their sophisticated world. They would afterwards dine here in the lavish surroundings that matched their own image, or go on to some smart restaurant, not just to eat but to see and be seen, while the large chunk of citizens on welfare, some without roofs over their heads, continued on a route known only by those at the bottom of the heap.

Simon was beginning to think like Marianne! Reminded again in her absence, as so often in her presence, that knowing her had changed how he saw things.

‘Are you as loyal to your family as Marianne is?’ he asked Ronald.

‘It’s an affliction all of us suffer from!’

‘Why did you put it that way?’

‘Perhaps because that’s how it sometimes used to feel to me,’ Ronald said reflectively. ‘I’d find myself doing something inconvenient and think to myself, “Damn the family!” The sort of thing I’m talking about is all behind me now, though.’

‘It isn’t for Marianne, and I have to tell you her family involvement is damaging our relationship.’

Ronald drank some Pepsi and rattled the ice in his glass. ‘My answer to that is that it’s up to you not to let it.’

‘If I knew how!’