Theo can afford the subscription: the fogey runs a hedge fund and, by Jomier’s standards, is rich. He has no children. He has no wife. Jomier cannot decide whether Theo is single because he is not attracted to women, or because women are not attracted to him. Or both. Theo is tall, bald, with bulging short-sighted eyes. He talks precisely and thinks precisely: hence his success at managing a hedge fund. Is Theo gay? A repressed homosexual? Or a repressed heterosexual? Or nothing at all? Does he feel no urge to remove the clothes of a beautiful woman, nibble her nipples, plunge his penis into her entrails? Or has that shrewdness which anticipates the rise or fall in the price of copper, nickel and oil also made him realise that a wife, like a car, depreciates sharply and brings a poor return?

Jomier suspects that, were Theo to unleash his libido, he would like to caress the naked bodies of slim young men. But Theo is no more likely to unleash his libido than he is to wear an open-necked shirt. The tourniquet is tight. Like the priests at the Oratory, Theo condemns all forms of ‘disordered’ sex. This includes masturbation and the use of contraceptives. He tells Jomier that, just as there are natural laws that govern inanimate matter, so there are natural laws that govern human behaviour. Newton arrives at the law of gravity from the fact that an apple falls to the ground. Aquinas deduces that a man’s penis was created by God to inseminate the female of his species. The exchange of pleasure that creates a bond between the copulating couple is a secondary end. It is wrong to thwart God’s intentions, particularly his primary intentions. Moreover, were it to be admitted in principle that sex was a good thing in itself, it would open up a Pandora’s box. Why confine it to marriage? Why not have sex before marriage, outside marriage? Men with men? Women with women? Why not cottaging, sheep-shagging, or sex with consenting gorillas?