But TV offers no respite from the aphrodisiacal imperative. It is not a backgammon board containing dice and counters and geometric shapes but a glass window through which Jomier sees gangsters and pundits and attractive women. Every soap, every drama, cries out: cherchez la femme. Jomier does not watch porn: he does not want sex. He watches film noirs where the good guy gets the girl. They fall in love. Jomier wants to love. To be loved. To cherish. To be cherished. He wants a Veronica Lake to fall in his arms. The urge to mate has left his loins but remains lodged in his brain. But Jomier is a retired barrister, not a taciturn private eye. He does not bear the scars and bruises from punch-ups with thugs and toughs on his body; he bears the scars and bruises on his psyche from the punch-up of life. Veronica Lake would sniff out a loser and move on to a Max.

Ruth does not give up. She has introduced Jomier to Pamela, Annabel and Taffeta. Now Judith. Jomier arrives before Judith. He talks to Ralph, Ruth’s languid lover who was once someone important in the BBC. It is June. Ralph talks about Wimbledon. Jomier has no interest in tennis but listens all the same. Ralph asks Jomier why Serbia produces champions when Britain does not. Jomier talks about the legacy of state sponsorship under Communism but his mind is elsewhere. It is on Ruth’s bust and bottom which extend in equal proportion to front and rear. Jomier notes the unusual equilibrium. There are women with large busts and women with large bottoms but rarely do they balance one another so well. It is unusual to see, outside Africa, a woman’s bottom as muscular as it is large. Jomier wonders if Ruth has African blood.

‘Do you remember Boris Becker?’ A direct question from Ralph distracts Jomier from his train of thought.

‘Wasn’t he the blond German who won Wimbledon in . . .?’

Ralph: ‘1985. And 1986.’

Becker, Jomier recalls, had a black wife who bore him two children. Ruth’s ancestors were slave traders from Bristol. Could one of them have fathered a child by an African and passed it off as his heir? Is there a touch of the tar brush in her past? A big-bottomed African gene introduced by one of the slave traders in Bristol? Or were they sugar merchants? Or perhaps both. The triangular trade. Trinkets from Bristol to Africa, slaves from Africa to America, sugar back to Bristol.

Ralph: ‘But he lost in 1987.’