Before his drink with Tom there is the movie with Judith. Jomier studies Time Out and the Evening Standard but can find no film that he wants to see. Jomier is fussy about films. He likes going to the cinema, particularly on a misty autumn evening – sitting in the dark, watching the ads and the trailers, the certificate from the censors, then the opening credits of the main feature – but rarely does he enjoy the film. Has Jomier changed? Or has the standard of movie-making declined? There was a time when the Americans made films with straightforward stories and tight, witty scripts: they can still be seen on afternoon TV or can be ordered from Lovefilm. No longer. Big names, big budgets and lavish promotion draw the crowds to watch crap. Jomier resists. He will only go to see a film if he has reason to believe it will be good. This was a point of contention with Tilly. Tilly liked to go with the flow of hype. The subliminal effect of write-ups in newspapers would make her want to see a film despite the damning reviews. Jomier had stood firm. He was damned if he would be suckered by the studios. Why pay to see a mediocre film in a cinema when you could watch a mediocre film on television for free? Or a good film on television – a classic – The Third Man, Battleship Potemkin, La règle du jeu? To which Tilly would reply that going to the movies, however mediocre the movie, was a night out.

In the event, Jomier and Judith agree that there is no film that they want to see. They go instead to an Indian restaurant and, over tandoori this and balti that, they dig deeper into one another’s lives. Judith has problematic children. There is her daughter, the thirty-eight-year-old briefly married now on-the-shelf Ophelia who has not spoken to her mother for four years. Judith does not know why though she has theories. She thinks that Ophelia blames the collapse of her own marriage on her parents’ divorce for which she blames her mother. ‘Perhaps, looking back . . .’ Judith now wonders whether, for the sake of the children, she should not have stuck it out with Beresford. ‘But that’s water under the bridge . . .’ Her son Tim has had mental troubles, ‘though one can hardly blame those on the divorce. He smoked so much dope when he was a teenager which was partly the fault of Alfredo.’

‘Alfredo?’

‘He was a Chilean painter I was seeing at the time.’

They discuss the possible link between smoking dope and schizophrenia, though Tim’s condition is more like ME – lethargy, apathy, chronic fatigue.

‘Depression?’

‘That too.’

Tim is thirty-four. He lives in Devon with a girlfriend. She is a potter. Tim helps her with the clay. Tim’s father, Beresford, pays him an allowance but ‘of course he is terribly disappointed, having spent all that money on sending him to Eton’.