Jomier marvels at the ability of the English to say one thing and do another; to talk of equality of opportunity while preserving a system under which, generation after generation, the dregs stay at the bottom and froth rises to the top. The English. Jomier is as English as most of the English but from his Huguenot gene comes a certain detachment. From time to time the Frog jumps on to the leaf of a water lily to study its habitat – the pond. How open English society seems to be. How welcoming to people throughout the world. Most of the billionaires in Britain are foreigners – Indians, Arabs, Russians, Iraqi Jews. Elegant squares in Belgravia remain empty and silent because the non-domiciled millionaires are elsewhere. Deep pits are dug into the ground in Knightsbridge and Chelsea, and cranes reach to the sky, as blocks of sumptuous apartments are built by sovereign funds for sheikhs and oligarchs. Feudal titles are bestowed upon immigrants – Sir Joshua and Lady Zion, Lord and Lady Japati, Baroness El-Aksa, Nazir Bookerbanana, OM.

Does Jomier resent this? Yes and no. At times he feels aggrieved that the English have been expelled from those elegant Georgian and Regency streets and squares where Sir Pitt Crawley once walked with Becky Sharp; that the only English to remain are the collaborators with the colonists, the acolytes of Mammon, leeches fat with money-blood that they have sucked from the system in the City; that the auction houses and shops and department stores patronised by his parents and grandparents – Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Fortnum & Mason, Paxton & Whitfield, Berry Brothers, Lobbs – now charge prices that only the bankers and hedge-funders and sheikhs and oligarchs can afford – the tradesmen meeting an enquiry from an indigenous Englishman with the mix of a smirk and apologetic smile: ‘If you ask the price you cannot afford it’ and ‘What do you expect?’; Go to Tesco, Primark, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer. Like a Navajo Indian, Jomier has been ejected from his ancestral lands in St James’s to live in a reservation under the flight path of jumbos, Airbuses and Boeings bringing the oligarchs from Moscow, the sheikhs from the Gulf, the oil barons from Caracas, the bankers from Zurich and New York.