‘It’s true. But you were right. About everything. Public school does give you a great network. Amazing what having a child does to one’s perspective,’ Elyas said. ‘But you always did see things more clearly than I did. I always envied that about you.’

‘You mean I had vision and you were wearing bifocals?’ she said.

Elyas laughed. ‘Like Butch and Sundance? And we both know how that ended.’ She smiled, and for a moment they were an ordinary couple.

‘This is not the Wild West,’ she said. ‘And going out in a blaze of gunfire is not on the cards for us.’

‘I used to feel as though I was playing snap while all the white kids played poker. I fought hard to get where I am. Up against rich boys who played tennis in the afternoons and went to country clubs on weekends. Guys whose fathers made calls to get them wherever they wanted to be.’

‘And now our son is one of those entitled types,’ Jia said, raising an eyebrow.

‘Isn’t that our whole problem? We want things and then when we get them we don’t feel we deserve them? I don’t want Ahad to struggle just because of my principles. The older I get, the more I understand that values and ideals get lost along the path; you lose a few and damage some of the others. We’re all compromising in some way or other. People talk about underachievement and a lack of brown kids at the top – well, you can’t be what you can’t see. People recruit in their own image, or pick someone they know. That’s how the ladder is climbed. At least your company seems to be giving young people a network.’

‘My father believed in the network,’ Jia said. ‘He ran his life on it and sent us to the best schools to build it. But networks have their own class system, and when your father is the kind of law lord who’ll have your kneecaps shot off, and NOT the kind that adjudicates British law, it’s not that straightforward. That’s what I want these guys to have, a future without shame of where they came from, you know?’ It was easy to be around Elyas; that was why she was with him. He accepted her for who she was, without judgement. But there were things about her that he didn’t know, and things she didn’t believe he would take well. So she gave him what she could, and kept what she couldn’t locked away.

‘Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if my parents had stayed in Pakistan,’ he said.

‘I know where I’d be: sporting a Hermès Birkin as I was being driven around by my chauffeur,’ said Jia.