‘Delighted,’ said Larry, slipping into the doctor’s clipped anglicisms, an accent as bogus as T. Bone’s. He shook her hand. Was this Mrs Bone? He decided to follow Ranch’s example and call her Betty.

‘It’s like having Dr Barry in the house!’ she shrieked, leading him into the hacienda-style lounge and doing a mime of disbelief involving bracelets and fat brown arms. Ranch went to the bar and took down half a dozen bottles of liquor and a steel cocktail shaker, while Betty put out bowls of nuts and pretzels. On the whitewash walls of the room were inexpensive reproductions of eighteenth-century English paintings – Constable, Gainsborough, Reynolds – and a large framed award from the Institute of Adult Entertainment, the Blue Ribbon Award, for twenty-five thousand sales of a work called Lap Attack!

Larry wedged himself into a little chintz-upholstered armchair, wondering where the Jewish child he had met on the plane was, and hoping that she was happy in the arms of her father and would not grow up to resemble any of the people he was now in the room with, himself included. From somewhere out of sight came the sounds of an afternoon soap opera, a woman’s voice wailing, ‘You promised me! You promised!’

‘Is there a telephone I could use?’ he asked. ‘There’s a call I should make. Mother’s a bit poorly.’

‘Why, that’s just charming,’ said Betty. ‘You’re a good son, Larry. We have boys too, you know. Harold and John. They’re in business in Miami.’ She pointed to a row of elaborately framed photographs on top of the shiny black back of a Japanese piano. Grinning boys with crew cuts. Frizzy-haired teenagers leaning against an old Chevrolet. A wedding picture with one of the boys, Harold or John, beside an overdressed, utterly anonymous young woman. The pictures stood in the shade of a tall vase of exotic white flowers. The impression was of a shrine to the dead.

‘The Sunshine State,’ she said, and she went to the photographs and made imperceptible adjustments to the angles of the frames. Ranch put an arm around her shoulders and kissed her cheek with a loud smacking noise.

‘Betty’s the best.’

Larry nodded. The last of the dangerous drinks was beginning to take effect and seemed to be numbing out certain nerve endings in his spine. If the Thunderbird had been outside he would have excused himself and driven away before this gathering, this little ship of fools, sailed any farther into the grotesque. But the car was not there and he needed twenty thousand dollars or there would be no car, and not too far in the future, perhaps, no family to drive back to.

Ranch tapped him on the shoulder. ‘How about a tour of the studio before we eat? You up for that?’