Jomier returns home in a gloomy mood. He turns on his computer and checks his emails. There is one from Henry. ‘Louisa and Jimmy are coming to London next week. Can you meet them at Heathrow and take them to the Hampton Clinic?’ Jomier replies: ‘Yes.’ There is another from a building society announcing that interest rates are to go down on their online accounts. That expects no reply. Take it or leave it, sucker. We lured you into depositing your money with us with the promise of a high rate of interest and now we are lowering it little by little because we know you can’t be bothered to shop around for a higher rate and open yet another account. Correct. But if Theo is right, it is not the interest that he is getting on his bank deposits that should worry Jomier but the fall in value of his funds. Jomier fights through a thicket of account numbers, passwords and customer IDs to access his bank accounts, pension funds and ISAs. The funds are all down – some more, some less. Clearly the fund managers paid by Jomier to care for his money have lacked Theo’s perspicacity. Jomier is enraged. Why pay fees to these supposed masters of the universe if they do no better than anyone else? He does not trust them. He suspects that they dump the worthless stocks of their prime clients like Max onto their sub-prime clients like Jomier. All Jomier’s rancour against the bankers and oligarchs that went into abeyance when he fell in love is now reignited by the idea of a shrinking pension fund and diminishing income.

Jomier must retrench. He must economise. He must cut his coat according to his shrunken cloth. But where are the cuts to be made? Jomier rarely travels or buys smart clothes or goes to the theatre or eats in restaurants other than the weekly Indian with Judith. Judith! Judith clearly is an expense or, if no great expense as such, a potential for expenditure drift. He thinks back to the cost of Christmas in Venice. True, she had paid her share, albeit a discounted share; but the ill will with which she had paid it – the brisk grumpiness with which she had written out the cheque – made it clear to Jomier that she had not expected him to take up her offer to pay her way. And Jomier had learned his lesson. He now always pays for the movies and Indians. He says ‘we’ll settle up later’ but that later never comes.