For how long had Jane known about Max’s affair with Tilly? Had she turned a blind eye because she was happy to get him off her back? Or off her front? His face out of her pudendum? His cock out of her mouth? Like Jomier and Tilly, Max and Jane had no doubt followed all the recipes in The Joy of Sex. Jomier, having raised in his own mind an image of Max making love with Jane, could not prevent himself imagining Max making love to Tilly – his face in her pudendum, his cock in her mouth. A day does not pass without Jomier seeing in his mind’s eye Tilly and Max in the Strand Palace Hotel; and, when Jane was away and the Filipina off-duty, on the sofa in the children’s nursery chez Max. Jane had no such visions. She had no imagination. It became clear, during those lunches, that she could live with the cheating but dreaded the untidiness of a divorce. If Max had gone on fucking Tilly discreetly, would she have let it run ad infinitum? Jomier had put it to her. She had been evasive. Had she known? She had had her suspicions. Had she said anything to Max? No. Why hadn’t she told Jomier? He would have made a fuss.

A second hypothesis – a variation on the first. Jane was aware of her frigidity and felt that she owed it to Max to let him have sex with Tilly. Max was a Swiss-Prussian Übermensch on his father’s side of the family, but with swarthy, hairy, hot-blooded genes from his mother’s Lebanese grandmother and Alexandrian Greek grandfather. Max made no secret of his strong appetites. He drooled openly at girls with big busts. ‘Nice cantaloupes.’ It was a running joke that Jomier had never found amusing. Tilly had told Jomier that he was a prude.

Tilly had large breasts. She was sweet and juicy like a cantaloupe melon. Jomier thought that he had always shown a due appreciation of her sexiness but not, perhaps, the enthusiasm shown by Max. He was, perhaps, a prude. He felt, like Montaigne, that a woman should discard modesty when she took off her clothes and resume it when she put them on again. Tilly thought so too. They had that in common. She did not like to talk openly about sex. Even in French. Yet she laughed at Max’s lubricious jokes. She loved his immodesty. His lack of inhibitions. Clearly she had longed to shed her inhibitions, discard her modesty, take off her clothes.