Jomier’s one-third share of the proceeds of the sale of his house in Notting Hill has enabled him to buy a terraced cottage in one of the streets between the Goldhawk and Uxbridge Roads west of Shepherd’s Bush. It had been built for a Victorian artisan. There is the usual double room on the ground floor running from front to back, and a small kitchen on the extension built into the garden. There are three bedrooms. The first has a wide bed; the second two bunk beds in which the children slept when they came to stay. Now they are too old for the bunk beds and they never come to stay. They have their own houses and, even when young, they preferred the comfort of their mother’s home in Kensington. Jomier knows that he should get rid of the bunk beds but does not.

The third bedroom is Jomier’s study, with his desk, his filing cabinets, his reference books, his computer. Jomier’s study is very tidy: everything has its place. So too the living room where the books and CDs are arranged neatly on shelves. Jomier has a Brazilian cleaner but she has little to do but wash and iron his clothes. The house is spick and span. So too the garden. No weed survives for more than a day after rising from the earth towards the sun. A leaf from his apple tree no sooner falls to the ground than it is put in a bag made of white flimsy biodegradable plastic stamped with the logo of the Hammersmith & Fulham Council. There are also orange bags for paper, plastic, bottles and tins – detritus that can be recycled – and black bags for real rubbish – vegetable peelings, broken light bulbs, soiled tissues, fish-skins. Jomier has his doubts about whether the contents of the orange bags are really recycled; he has been told that the black, orange and white bags all end up in the same landfill, or are dropped into the North Sea from the same barge. Even if this were proved to be true, Jomier would still sift and sort his rubbish. It satisfies his love of order. It gives him something to do.

Much that goes into the orange bag is junk mail. Among the cards from minicab companies and flyers from take-away Indian restaurants, there are thick glossy magazines with page upon page advertising houses for sale. Jomier’s spirits rise when he sees a house similar to his offered for sale at twice the sum he paid for it; but they sink when he sees that houses in Notting Hill comparable to the one he lived in with Tilly going for ten times more. If they had remained married, Jomier would be a property millionaire.