Stylistically, the foyer of the Park Hotel was a marriage between an Italian bank and an English gentleman’s club, but in its scale, its air of having been built the previous afternoon, the not quite convincing efficiency of it all, it was entirely home grown.

Larry made for the drink station in the well of the room and ordered a large Jim Beam from a barman in a tight white pea jacket. The convention was in full swing, and among the fountains, the marble, the plump sofas and the scurrying bellhops, several hundred mostly middle-aged men milled about industriously, peering at each other’s identity tags. There were many fulsome greetings, and when they laughed they advertised their trade with mouths full of lustrous and symmetrical teeth. They were wholesome-looking men, by and large, and though they must have had their share of the world’s problems – errant kids, alimonies, mal-practice suits – they wore everywhere the same expression of intense boyish delight, so that Larry was tempted to suspect them of visiting their own medicine chests. Mainstream Americans. Taxpayers, baseball fans. Serious people with a certain chiselled gravitas. Veterans, some of them, of Korea and Vietnam. Patriots. Yet the more Larry looked at them the more he wondered how long his self-willed exile among such people, who had started to appear as exotic as Berbers or Malay fire-walkers, could possibly continue. It was as if the country were slipping away from him, or he was beginning at last to find unignorable the fine hard surface of its difference, of his difference. Vexing to have to see this now! To be forced to admit how much more there was to belonging somewhere than just being there. But where else could he go? Back to England? What would he do there? He would be a minor item in the evening paper – ‘Local Tennis Ace Comes Home’ – and then sink without trace, reduced, if he was lucky, to double-glazing ads on television, or perhaps a tennis instructorship at a local country club, where he would sit at the bar in his whites, a lush with solarium-tanned skin, making assignations with unhappily married women.

At the front desk he enquired whether a Mr Bone, a Mr T. Bone, had a room at the hotel. Anywhere but LA and he would have received the ‘wiseass’ look, but in a city where doormen were dressed like characters in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, the citizens were not given to displays of incredulity. The receptionist, Kimberly Ng, sporting an Employee of the Month badge on her lapel, checked her screen and said that they did indeed have a Mr Bone with them at the moment. Larry gave his name and she called up to the room, informing him that he was expected, and that he should take the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor of the Tower.

‘Room 2714, sir. Enjoy your visit with us today.’