Saturday 1 p.m. Jomier, having finished his accounts, makes himself a tuna-fish sandwich and eats it while listening to Any Questions on the radio. He then returns to his study, sits in his armchair with the New York Review of Books open on his lap and falls asleep. He wakes half an hour later and goes to the bathroom to splash his face with cold water. As he raises his head from the basin, he sees his reflection in the mirror of the medicine cupboard. Jomier still does not like what he sees – un cocu, un pauvre con – but he remembers his programme for the evening, with a possible denouement in Judith’s bedroom, and he remembers too that behind the mirror in the medicine cupboard is Pfizer’s magical potion that restores potency to the impotent – Viagra. Should he take a capsule with him to Judith’s dinner party? Should he unobtrusively swallow it after the other guests have left – leaving the twenty-minute time lag before the drug takes effect for loading the dishwasher, a digestif, foreplay?

Jomier opens the cupboard door. The face of the cocu slides away and is replaced by a neat row of packets, tubs and bottles. Jomier takes the packet marked with the Pfizer logo, opens it, and looks at the capsules embedded in plastic and covered with thin tinfoil. There are three. There were four. The missing capsule tells a tale. Jomier would rather not tell the tale but memory is not always compliant. He smells heather. He is in Scotland. A house party. Old friends playing upper-class Edwardians with croquet, charades and corridor-creeping part of the game. Why is Jomier there? He is in his heyday as an available man. His divorce from Tilly is well in the past. Why not a second marriage in the future? It is a large house party with two unattached women of a certain age among the guests.