Jomier’s eye on the upper deck of the 94 bus is on the level of the windows above the shops. Plants grow in rotting sills and clogged gutters. He can alight here to go underground to catch a Central Line train but prefers to stay on the bus for another three stops to the station at Holland Park. He passes from the Third World into the First. On Holland Park Avenue, a butcher’s shop displays its cuts like jewellery in the window of Cartier’s; a French patisserie glitters with Tiffany-like confections; a bookshop offers novels up for literary prizes; a brightly lit chemist’s sells expensive elixirs for eternal youth; and there is a coffee shop where long-legged young women in designer jeans and preppy young men in chinos sit reading the Herald Tribune or Prospect or Foreign Affairs.

Jomier alights at Holland Park Tube station. There is a risk that in the lift going down to the Central Line Jomier will meet a former neighbour and have to make cheery conversation. At one time he might have run into Tilly or the children. Not now. Tilly lives with Max on the other side of Campden Hill. The children are grown up and gone. And Tilly never takes public transport. She either drives herself in her Prius or summons a minicab from Addison Lee.

Jomier moved to Hammersmith after his divorce. And because of his divorce. It was a ‘no-fault’ divorce. The Family Court had no interest whatsoever in adultery, the breaking of vows. It required only for one party, Tilly, to decide that the marriage had ‘irretrievably broken down’. The vehicle was a write-off. It could be disposed of as scrap. The function of the Family Court was not to dispense justice but ensure the well-being of the children. The mother was their default carer; the father the default provider. The children’s way of life and standard of living must change as little as possible. The Family Court ruled that the house in Blenheim Crescent should be sold and the proceeds divided – one-third to Jomier, two-thirds to Tilly. Jomier was to continue to pay the mortgage on Tilly’s new house on Princedale Road and a monthly sum for each child until they reached the age of eighteen. His disposable income was suddenly a quarter of what it had been before.