I began to work very hard in Delauncey’s: I even learned how to make a string of new cocktails from a book that I had bought myself, and wrote their names up with chalk on the blackboard behind my head. I was bursting with initiatives, like one of those model employees from the how-to-get-ahead books who ends up owning the company. Mrs Delaney noticed how I was always bang on time for my shift – or even a few minutes early – and polishing glasses with a perky smile. She began complimenting me on my industry, and giving me little conspiratorial glances throughout the day as though she and I were the only ones in there who really understood the meaning of good old-fashioned hard work. Like most rich hippies, she had a staunchly authoritarian heart. Sometimes she complained about the waiters and waitresses to me – their lateness, their laziness, the stains on their white shirts, their ‘simple lack of professionalism’, as she liked to put it – but I made a point of never joining in. Nobody likes a snitch, not even the boss who’s buttering the snitch up to be a snitch.

The tips started stacking up, along with the salary and the overtime money, and I wasn’t spending much. I got paid in cash and kept it all in my suitcase at the Whartons’. Week by week, I watched the small pile of notes grow like a grubby but well-fed little pet. Then sometimes I would divide it up with elastic bands and chivvy selected bundles to different hidey-holes in the room. No one was going to steal it, of course: the Whartons were honest people and unusually lacking in curiosity. They accepted me as a simple and unremarkable fact of life now, like the rain or muddy footprints in the hall. But I liked the administrative business of counting and hiding the notes. It was as if I were tied up in a secret conspiracy with myself. And I enjoyed just looking at the money, contained there in its squat packets. All sorts of possibilities were lurking in it, silently multiplying like good bacteria.