At long last two waiters appear at their table, one with the antipasti – first of the seven courses – the other to fill their glasses with the half-bottle of Asti Spumate that is included in the price. Jomier is grateful for the distraction. He has thrown down the gauntlet – ‘we are avoiding talking about our previous visits to Venice’ – and now Judith has picked it up; but is he ready for a duel of competitive reminiscences? He does not want to tell her about the holiday with Tilly. He is not detached. He feels wretched. He grieves for his lovely young bride. He mourns over the death of his marriage. He longs for his children and grandchildren. What is he doing celebrating Christmas with vulgar Germans or Austrians or Swiss and the discarded fuck-bag of Beresford and Alfredo and Giles and God knows who else? He should be in Hammersmith watching Sam and Ned unwrap their presents; or at the estancia with Louisa and little Nunci and Ysabel listening to Fernando’s talk about rugby and feeling Jimmy’s clap on his back.

Jomier enjoys life in retrospect more than he does at the time. In this, he is the opposite of a Guarani Indian, who lives in the present. Jomier knows this. One day he will savour happy memories of this Christmas lunch at the Hotel Palazzo Solaia with a woman who loves him. She sits opposite him talking gaily about this and that, certainly aware of the psychic turbulence in the head of the man she is with but quite confident, as a frequent flyer, that resistance to the stress and strain of such turbulence is factored into the design and tolerances of the aluminium struts and rivets of the wings of their affair.

She is also confident that if she were to be permitted to take over the controls of the Jomier 737 she could fly it above the turbulence to a calmer karma at 38,000 feet. She can show Jomier how to detach himself from his feelings of anger, frustration, regret. None of this is put into words but her very serenity is a sales pitch for one of her retreats in Andalusia. This in itself is an annoyance. More than an annoyance, Jomier feels that it is a threat to his identity. What is he if not a nexus of anger, frustration, regret? What would he write in his journal if he had no anxieties, no complaints? Jomier feels wary of this soothing femininity matched to the contemplative mysticism of the East. He sees Judith as a huge, soft, smiling yin waiting to envelop and absorb a puny, muddled yang.