‘Absolutely nothing,’ he said. ‘Well, I say nothing, but she claims to help out at soup kitchens and places like that. I’m not sure that she really puts in a lot of effort, though. The homeless. That’s gender neutral too, isn’t it? That phrase gets bandied around a lot these days, doesn’t it? They’re talking about having gender-neutral toilets at the BBC. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest; it’s the women I feel sorry for. I don’t believe they really want to go to the loo when there’s a nasty, smelly man in the next stall, do they? I said that to one of my colleagues and she accused me of being sexist, but I was genuinely trying to help. Then she told me that I was helping in the wrong way, which made no sense to me at all. I try to keep up, I really do, but every day something else has changed and it’s impossible to stay abreast of it all, don’t you agree?’

‘I haven’t given it much thought,’ she said, leafing through some papers.

‘And who makes these random determinations, I wonder? About what we should and shouldn’t say.’

‘Society.’

‘Well, you know what Mrs Thatcher said about society, don’t you? That there’s no such thing, just individual men and women and families.’

The receptionist ignored this remark and George glanced at his watch. Really, this was too much. The last time he’d been kept waiting this long was on one of his visits to Highgrove, and one expected it there. Welcomed it, even.

‘Well, if you’re talking to him, tell him I said hello,’ he said eventually.

‘Talking to who?’

‘To Aidan.’

‘Aidan doesn’t exist,’ replied the young woman, taking a folder from her drawer and putting some papers in it before staring across at him defiantly.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I said, Aidan doesn’t exist,’ she repeated. ‘He never did, really.’

George laughed. ‘What a peculiar thing to say,’ he said. ‘Are you telling me that he was a figment of my imagination?’

‘Not yours, mine,’ she replied, standing up and disappearing into a sort of kitchen area located to the rear of the room.

George stared at where she might have been had she not had the rudeness to walk out on him and blinked a few times. There had been an Aidan, hadn’t there? That hadn’t been somewhere else, like his agent’s office, or the Salford studio or his doctor’s surgery? But no, he was sure of it. He could picture the chap sitting right there behind that same desk. They’d spoken a hundred times.