Jomier agrees. A post-coital aroma – scent, sweat and glandular secretions – mingles with that of coffee and singed toast. Jomier too would like to take a shower: no doubt he too exudes a post-coital aroma.

Ophelia stands. She is basically pretty but there are signs of wear-and-tear. No sun. No space. No servants.

‘She does it on purpose,’ says Judith as she returns from seeing her daughter to the door.

‘A cry for help?’

‘I’ve done all I can. And anyway, she thinks I’m the problem, not the solution.’

Jomier goes up to take a shower. Judith has put out a large fluffy bath towel on an armchair in the bathroom. The bathroom is large – the size of a bedroom – with framed pictures on pale yellow distressed walls. On a dressing table there are tubs of oils and unguents; on the shelves jars of bath salts and bottles of bath oil. Placed around the bath are coloured candleholders: Judith has treated Jomier to a soak – lying for an hour in candlelit gloom with hot scented water up to his chin. Aromatherapy. A physical and mental cleansing. A spiritual detoxification. Jomier had emerged from this bath and passed through to Judith’s bedroom wrapped in the large fluffy towel. He had lain back against the cushions at the top of the bed while Judith unwound the fluffy towel and caressed his scented skin. Her body, lean from yoga and a diet of tofu and wild rice, had hovered over his like a morning mist on a Chinese scroll. Controlled. Artful. The Kama Sutra.

There is a time for taking a bath and a time for taking a shower and now, following Ophelia’s visit, and in unfiltered daylight, it is time for taking a shower. The shower head is attached to the mixer taps at the head of the bath. There is a slightly grubby shower curtain. The fixtures in the bathroom date from the eighties or nineties when Judith first moved in. The paint is peeling on the side of the bath and at one end, where water has penetrated into the wood, the panel has warped. The pressure is weak. Water dribbles over Jomier’s body, alternately scalding and cold. Should Jomier offer to pay for the installation of a thermostatically controlled Dornbracht power shower of the kind he has in his house in Hammersmith? He considers the idea, then relegates it to the pending file in his mind. Judith might be offended by the implicit criticism of the present shower. She might see in the offer a premature presumption that she would like him to move in. It would be expensive and, if their relationship was not to last long, money wasted. Judith never takes showers.