And for a drink! Clearly Tom would not want to waste a whole evening on Jomier: he will have arranged to have dinner with someone pretty, someone powerful or someone rich. Or, if Tom runs true to form, someone pretty, powerful and rich. Since Jomier had first known him in London in the 1970s, Tom had worked on converting his roguish charm into cash. He coaxed commissions out of the editors and advances out of the publishers whom he met in the salons of fashionable salonnières where he played the role of court jester. His dishevelled, half-starved look made him attractive to women. So too his wit. Tom had kissed the Blarney stone: he had the gift of the gab. He made girls laugh. He put them at their ease. In this he was like Marco. Tom and Marco: Jomier’s two womanising friends. They met only once – brought together by Jomier – and took against one another at once. Marco: elegant, suave, aristocratic, cosmopolitan. Tom: scruffy, furtive, Celtic – an upstart who had sneaked in by the servants’ entrance and passed unobserved through the green baize door. Marco made love with an air of noblesse oblige. Tom was a sexual chancer. Like Maupassant’s Bel Ami, his life plan was to nail an heiress – a girl whose daddy was both rich and influential.

Advantageous marriages are out of fashion: we are meant to marry only for love. Jomier, true to the zeitgeist, had disapproved of the opportunistic discipline his friend imposed on his heart. He had also thought him unlikely to succeed. Escorting the daughters of the rich is a costly business: they expect to travel in taxis, eat in expensive restaurants, sit in good seats at the theatre; they invite you to join them in villas in Tuscany or to stay at their parents’ country houses – quite unaware that the cost of the cab, the restaurant, the tickets to Covent Garden, the flight to Pisa or the tips for their parents’ servants are major items in the budget of a freelance hack. Tom’s scruffiness was not an affectation: after the tips and tickets there was no money left for a wardrobe. Tom’s clothes were threadbare; there were holes in the soles of his loafers. The girls found this enchanting: and finally the enchantment paid off. Arabella Marton became pregnant by Tom: as her father fumed and her mother urged her to go and see Mr Deventer in Harley Street, hot tears were shed at Marton Towers. Arabella refused to see Mr Deventer. She would have the ‘Irish bastard’, as her father termed his grandchild in utero, whether they liked it or not. The parents relented. There was a grand wedding in the parish church at Marton with the bride in a loose-fitting dress.