‘He’s first rate,’ said T. Bone, leaning forward confidentially. ‘Found in a carpetbag in the ladies’ conveniences at Union Station. In and out of institutions all his life. Convinced he’ll meet his mother on “the other side”, poor lamb. Tell me, Larry. Do children in England still have those little Barnardo boxes for collecting money for the orphans?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Larry, who vaguely remembered that he and Alec had once had such a box. A little yellow cottage with a slot in the roof.

‘One hopes so,’ said T. Bone, settling back and smiling from the shadows. ‘It encourages them to think of those less fortunate. There’s so little of that these days. N’est-ce pas?”

‘Last days of the Empire,’ said Larry, flippantly.

‘Oh, not yet,’ said T. Bone. ‘No. I think we’ve a little more time.’

This man, thought Larry, returning the other’s amused gaze, contained within himself such depths of fraudulence you would never come to the end of him. To look at he was a benign, slightly eccentric figure in his sixties with an uncanny resemblance to the older John Betjeman. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and, on his very white legs, some manner of surgical support socks finished off with a pair of highly polished brogues. His accent was the sort of camp upper-class English little heard since the death of Noël Coward, but beneath it, like the faint pattern of old wallpaper under whitewash, Larry detected another voice, something grimly urban, provincial and brutish, so that it was not difficult to imagine him, somewhere in the 1950s, a little slicked hoodlum in a bombed-out and rain-damaged city like Plymouth or Slough, the type of character who carried a sharpened steel comb in his pocket.

Ranch’s cool and dangerous drink arrived, blue and gin-dry and delicious. Ranch and Larry put on sunglasses, an event followed by ten minutes of small talk concerning the heat, the merits of Mexican food, the flight of the comet. Finally, after a lengthy pause during which the ice cracked and tinkled in their glasses, T. Bone said: ‘We all adored you as Dr Barry.’

‘Jesus, yes,’ said Ranch.

‘Thanks,’ said Larry.

‘They should have made more of you,’ said T. Bone, ‘but television is run by morons. Don’t you think?’

‘Morons,’ crooned Ranch, as though he were at a revivalist meeting.

‘I’m glad to be out of it,’ said Larry, watching from the corner of his eye Ranch flick peanuts into the air and expertly catch them in his mouth.

‘We have a little project,’ said T. Bone, ‘we think would be perfect for you. Nothing extreme. The kind of viewing enjoyed by thousands of healthy Americans every day.’

‘Except,’ said Ranch, resting a hand on Larry’s shoulder, ‘it won’t be Americans watching it.’