Women, Jomier realises, have yet to adapt to their own liberation. Perhaps they never will. Jomier’s mistake when it came to Tilly 1 was to treat her as a liberated woman. Her opinions on this and that – sex outside marriage, the Vietnam War – were ‘progressive’ because progressive views, like Biba dresses, were then in fashion. But she did not want her feminist views to be taken at face value. She did not want to be consulted about what they could or could not afford; she did not want to think about the means to the end. She had been born into a certain position in English society and expected Jomier to maintain it. She hated being treated by Jomier as a compañera – a comrade-wife who went to cheap restaurants to save money; she wanted to be a kept woman who felt sexy eating pâté de foie gras and drinking champagne.

‘Idiot!’ Jomier is not thinking of Tilly. He is thinking of himself. Tessa’s stream of consciousness is momentarily arrested: Jomier has said the word out loud.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t call him that,’ says Tessa.

Who is she talking about? Jomier has not been listening. He tries to pick up the thread of what she is saying.

‘I think the proposal probably wasn’t much good. That’s the trouble these days. You have to do as much research for the proposal as you do for the book . . .’

Jomier remembers. Tessa is a writer. Or she was a writer before she married. What had she written? Chick lit? A biography of her great-aunt? He cannot remember. It does not seem to matter. Tessa burbles on. Jomier wants to look at his watch, to see if the time has come to take Ned home. He is afraid that Tessa will take this as a sign that he is not interested in what she is saying. He waits for a natural break; or for some act of God. Rain. Or Ned falling off the climbing frame.

Feminism. Jomier has a theory that he would like to put to Tessa. Feminism is a form of flirtation. The female of the species is genetically programmed to provoke the male of the species to assert its strength. Only thus can the female discover at whom to squirt her pheromones and direct her come-hither looks. In the past there were wars to sort out the men from the boys but after two world wars they no longer serve this purpose. They cost too many lives – the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. There was no sifting in the trenches: the strong died with the weak. No heroes returned. Technology – the Maxim gun, the cluster bomb, the tactical nuclear weapon. Valour is redundant.