A broad and velvety walkway connected the hotel to the adjoining Tower, the walls serving as a gallery for photographs of the luminaries who had graced the hotel in the past. Reagan’s image was prominent: a large picture of him on a spacious balcony looking relaxed under the California sun, a half-dozen smiling cronies around him. Then Reagan on the telephone to receive some historic message. Reagan with Nancy, a loving couple, tanned and innocent.

Farther along, there were images of the moonshot astronauts – Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins – and though he was now running late, Larry paused to look at these more closely. The astronauts had been honoured at a reception in the hotel entitled ‘Dinner of the Century’. It certainly looked grand enough. In the foreground there were uniformed trumpeters, then about a thousand dignitaries, and finally the astronauts themselves in dark suits, looking solemn and pleased and impossibly modest.

It was just before four o’clock on a summer’s morning in England when the Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquillity. The Valentines, like any other family in the country with a TV set, had sat in a breathless hush watching the crackly flag of history unfurl in front of them. Larry on the floor between his father’s knees; Alec snuggling up with Alice on the couch. The thrilling ellipses of the language! Its weird laconic delivery. ‘Roger, you’re looking great, you’re go.’ ‘How us, Houston?’ Armstrong, cool as any gunslinger, guiding the module down, while at Mission Control the backroom boys in their white shirts sat anxiously before rows of whirring computers. How strange that today of all days he had crossed the path of these men, icons of the kind of clean-cut heroism he had never ceased to admire. It was as though their picture had been posted there as a warning, or a reminder, or in some way to mock him. He wondered how many people remembered there had been a Russian craft, Luna 15, in low orbit round the moon at the same time as Apollo, and that it had ended its flight by crashing at 300 mph into the Sea of Crises. ‘How me?’ he muttered, ‘How me?’ as he entered the elevator, ascending to the twenty-seventh floor in the company of several Japanese businessmen, who gazed studiously into the car’s limited middle distance.