Ten days have passed since Jomier and Judith went to the cinema in Chelsea. If Jomier wishes to court Judith he cannot postpone proposing another date for much longer. Jomier has her email; he has her landline number; he has her mobile number; he has her postal address. Of the four, email is his preferred means of communication. Writing letters or even postcards has become cumbersome; texts are too fiddly; a telephone call is too immediate. It might be a bad moment. A brusque tone of voice may mean only that the person called is late for an appointment, or is longing to pee, but it can be mistaken for a brush-off. Email is good because the recipient can choose when he or she wishes to hear from the outside world. It can be short and to the point. There can still be brush-offs – a delayed reply, a non-committal reply, or no reply at all – but they will not be caused by bad timing or an importunate call of nature.

The only disadvantage to email, for Jomier, is the sight of the long list of names in his email address book. As with his digitalised postal address book, there are many ‘contacts’ Jomier has not contacted for many years and who have not contacted him. They lie in a neat column like gravestones in a war cemetery, not the names of the dead but of those who are dead to Jomier. Never again in this world will Jomier communicate with Dr Harvey MacAdam, a private doctor he first consulted before the era of email when he thought he might have contracted a venereal disease from Max via Tilly. There was no rash; no discharge. It was merely the thought that perhaps Max on one of his business trips had had sex with a prostitute in Dubai or Bangkok. Dr MacAdam had gently told Jomier that there could be no diagnosis without symptoms; and, after Jomier had filled him in on some of the background to his anxieties, had given him the name of the psychoanalyst Easton whose fees were on a par with his own.

MacAdam, Marlowe, Miller, Moore – the names of men and women who had one time come into Jomier’s life and now had left again. Some meant nothing to Jomier. Milson – who was he? A life-insurance salesman? An estate agent? A pupil in chambers? The solicitor acting for a client in a long-forgotten case? Jomier now wonders whether his inability to remember anything at all about Milson – [email protected] – is a symptom of frontal lobe dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Or is the fault Milson’s – a man inherently so uninteresting that his name triggers no memory in Jomier’s mind?