There are disadvantages even to drinks parties. As often as not, a number of the other guests are men and women Jomier has known for many years. He has known them but never felt inclined to get to know them better. That ten minutes of conversation back in the 1970s was even then enough to inform Jomier that he and his interlocutor would never be friends. Year after year Jomier comes face-to-face with these same acquaintances of yesteryear. Jomier and Tilly had had them to dinner but had never been asked back. Or vice versa. ‘We must ask the Platitudes to dinner . . .’ An intention never fulfilled. Social guilt gradually fading. Then once again face-to-face with the Platitudes. You know. They know. No shared sense of humour. No sexual attraction. No social ambition – the mixes that might have gone into a mortar to bind the Jomiers and the Platitudes together. They will run into one another again. And again. And again. See you in Purgatory: but they are in Purgatory – the drinks party. Words lost in the hubbub. Gusts of foul breath. But at least this is not a dinner party. They are not in Hell.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Narrative. There is no narrative in Jomier’s life. A life like a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, and Jomier has now reached those last chapters that drive biographers to their wits’ end. Nothing happens. There is nothing to say. The last lap between retirement and death can last a year, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years – the elastic of life stretched by new drugs, medical techniques, robotics, diagnostic machines.

There had been a story. Jacques Jomier, a French Protestant, had moved to London in the seventeenth century after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He was a bookbinder. He set up shop in Soho. He had a wife who was also a Protestant and also French. With her he begat a Jomier who begat another Jomier who begat another Jomier. These later Jomiers married women from the indigenous population and with each begetting the Frenchness was thinned by British blood, and the Calvinism by easier-going Anglicanism, until there was nothing French about the Jomiers but their name, and nothing Calvinist but the occasional feeling that Jomier has upon waking in the morning that the whole human race is damned.

As a child Jomier had been in two minds about his ancestry. It made him different – even special – but meant that he was called a Frog at school where the pupils were addressed by their family names. A public school. It was common for public-school boys to pick on anything distinctive as a pretext for teasing and bullying. Red hair. A big nose. A spotty complexion. A French name. The teachers in loco parentis looked on and approved. Ragging, like beating, bullying and brutal sports, formed character. It was part of the ‘ethos’ of the public school. It transformed cringing wimps into leaders of men.