Jomier dines with his friends the Richards – Adrian, the parvenu Eurosceptic, and Mary, the granddaughter of an earl. He does not take Judith just as Judith does not take him to dinner with some of her yogic friends. As a couple they remain semi-detached. It has been tacitly accepted that each should occasionally see old friends on their own. So far the convention has worked well: Judith has assured Jomier that he would be bored by Raphael and Madge Samuelson; Jomier that Judith would detest the Richards. He has described their reactionary views and explained their continuing friendship on the grounds that he and Adrian ‘go back a long way’.

Would the Samuelsons be bored by Jomier? Would the Richards detest Judith? Is this implicit in the choice of friends whom they see as a couple and those they see alone? Put another way, would the Samuelsons invite Judith to their organic evenings in Islington if she had Jomier in tow? And would the carnivorous super-polluting Richards invite Jomier to dinner if they knew that the grungy Judith would come too? Jomier cannot answer for the Samuelsons but he knows the way the minds of the Richards work. He is also aware of his value to Mary as a single man. She does much entertaining: bankers, actresses, MPs, even government ministers. Almost everyone is someone but there is an occasional spinster cousin who has to be matched with a man in which case a no one like Jomier will do.

Jomier knows where he stands. He does not mind. Dining in a large elegant house in Kensington makes him feel that he still has a toehold on the right side of Shepherd’s Bush. And after weeks of eating food that is either raw or steamed or poached, he looks forward to the thick mayonnaise on the lobster and the grease dripping from the joint. He enjoys the ice-cold vintage Krug, the mellow Chateau Très Cher 1986 and the plump Cohiba cigars. He likes the glittering candlelit table furniture, the crisp linen napkins, the silver knives and forks. If the price to be paid is making conversation with the spinster cousin, so be it. He is happy to pay it for the fare, and for the sharp conversation between movers and shakers which he sometimes joins in. He likes to think that in the corridors of power in the Palace of Westminster a junior minister might say to a senior minister: ‘This interesting barrister I met at the Richards’ had an excellent image for the sub-prime mortgage crisis – a lot of party balloons filled with helium holding up the bigger balloon of the American economy, some of which have been pricked with a pin by a delinquent toddler . . .’