Jomier’s host is Adrian Richards, a friend from his days at Oxford. His hostess is Adrian’s wife Mary. No sooner has Jomier arrived at the crenellated shooting lodge than he wishes he was back at home. What is a house party but a protracted dinner party – the dredging of the mind for something to say not just in the evening but at breakfast, lunch and tea? Jomier does not fit in. He does not shoot grouse. He does not stalk deer. He does not fly-fish for trout on lochs and burns. He does not play bridge. Nor, in the past, did his friend Adrian. But Adrian has taken them up. He has used the money he has made managing the money of Saudi sheikhs and Russian oligarchs to build upon the foundations laid by his father who, on the day of his birth, had driven from Tunbridge Wells to Windsor to put his name down for Eton. Eton. Oxford. The Bullingdon. The Conservative Association. Eurosceptic speeches at the Union. Getting to know the right people. Chatting up their sisters. Marrying Mary Tattenham whose mother, Lady Clara, was the daughter of an earl.

Jomier sees nothing wrong with social climbing. It was the default preoccupation of ambitious young men in the nineteenth century and only temporarily replaced in the twentieth by unsustainable idealistic aberrations – Bolshevism, Existentialism, Hippyism. Now in London, at the turn of a new century, it is back in fashion; and if Jomier has any criticism to make of his friend Adrian, it is only that he goes about it in too obvious a way. The ropes and hooks and karabiners of the mountaineer are too much in evidence beneath the pinstriped suit. His pink coat for hunting, his plus fours for shooting, his waders for fishing are all brand new. They expose him as a parvenu.

The smell of heather fades. The momentary hallucination gives way to the true-life odours of soggy shaving brush and toothpaste. Jomier is not in Scotland. He is in the bathroom of his house in Hammersmith. He puts the packet of Viagra back on the shelf of the medicine cupboard. The memories return. Viagra. Molly. Annie. Molly is Mary Richards’ niece. She is there at the shooting lodge in Scotland with a friend and flatmate Annie. The two girls are in their early thirties: they are not ‘of a certain age’. Annie is urban. She works in PR and lives in Barons Court. Like Jomier she does not shoot or stalk or fish. This leads to a fellow feeling. They chat on walks and when they find themselves next to one another at dinner. She is not a great beauty but she is fresh. White teeth. Clear eyes. Thick blonde hair. Unblemished skin. Also vulnerable. Unhappy. Her parents are divorced. Her father has cancer. Her brother is on drugs.