Jomier prevaricates. He has to think about what he thinks on the question and then decide how many of these thoughts should be expressed to Tessa. He feels he has had the worst of both worlds: a wife who earned nothing, then left him and took him to the cleaners. If Tilly had had a career – a lawyer, a teacher – that had given her a standing in the world as something more than Mrs Jomier, would she have felt less impelled to have sex with Max? Or would she have found some Lothario in the workplace? A partner in the directors’ dining room? The personal trainer in the corporate gym?

Jomier likes Tessa. He feels sympathy over her dilemma. ‘I have a friend,’ he says, ‘who thinks women should be educated to make them good wives for educated men.’

Tessa scowls. ‘That’s medieval,’ she says.

‘He would take that as a compliment,’ says Jomier.

‘You have strange friends,’ says Tessa.

‘We go back a long way,’ says Jomier.

‘Even so,’ says Tessa.

Jomier asks Tessa about the role models in her childhood. Tessa’s mother did not work and was neurotic and so was left by Tessa’s father, a professor of Spanish, who took early retirement and went to live with one of his students in Madrid. Tessa does not visit her father. She remains angry with him for deserting the home. Jomier senses that she looks to him, at that moment, to play his role. Jomier, thinking of his own daughter Louisa, far away on the pampas, accessible only on the telephone or via Skype, tries to rise to Tessa’s expectations but he is afraid to talk. He does not want to infect her with his pessimism, his cynicism, his disillusion. Jomier feels sorry for Tessa just as he feels sorry for Henry and Louisa, and for all those whose adult condition has been blighted by the distress of their parents’ separation. Jomier is against divorce. It enables women to take men to the cleaners and causes children to suffer in ways they do not understand. It lays a time bomb in the child’s unconscious mind which is only detonated in later life – self-obsession, self-doubt, depression, the doomed sense that what happened to their parents will inevitably happen to them.

‘It seems to me,’ says Jomier at last, ‘that children need stability, continuity, firmness and overwhelming love. The first thing, then, is for you and Hugh to stick together . . .’

Tessa shrugs and smiles as if to say ‘take that as given’.

‘But when it comes to caring for the children . . .’ Jomier hesitates. Does he know what he thinks? ‘Nannies and au pairs are fine so far as they go but they are like Gurkhas or prostitutes. They are doing the job for money.’

Tessa listens: so far she seems to like what she hears.