They are back in London. Jomier has twice met Annie for lunch. She has been warm, friendly, interested, amusing. And she has been needy. Her father is dying. He is in pain. He is angry. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych, he cannot understand how life around him can go on as before. He curses the doctors. He is vile to his young wife, Annie’s stepmother. He is vile to Annie. ‘ “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” I suppose,’ says Annie to Jomier. She has studied English at the University of East Anglia and so knows this line of poetry written by Dylan Thomas. Also Larkin’s: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. She feels she has been fucked up by her parents. ‘Mum thinks Dad is being punished for leaving her. She doesn’t say so, but I can tell.’

Jomier listens patiently. He is a shoulder to cry on – the kindly, sympathetic dad that Annie never knew. And she stands in for the absent Louisa. Frustrated paternal instincts are reanimated in his psyche. He longs to hug and hold Annie as he once did little Louisa, to stroke her hair and brush away her tears. But Annie is not little. And she is not Louisa. Within his psyche, the altruistic superego is harassed by a predatory libido that brushes aside any ersatz incest taboo. It takes advantage of that drowsy state when he is slipping into sleep, or first wakes in the morning, to screen porno imaginings of Jomier peeling off Annie’s knickers and uncovering her pretty, pointed breasts. I don’t think that age matters. Jomier reruns the clip of her glance when she said this – the flutter of her eyelashes, the bashful effrontery. If it does not matter to her, why should it matter to him? How many women are happily married to older men; older men to younger women?

Following the break-up of his marriage, Jomier had thought much about the nature of love. He has read Freud and Jung and Havelock Ellis; Erikson, Bettelheim and Simone de Beauvoir. He is satisfied that a man’s appearance means less to a woman than a woman’s appearance to a man. Celebrity, riches, power, authority will trump a receding hairline or a pot belly. He accepts that conjugal love is often shaped by the template of earlier familial relationships – brother–sister, mother–son, father–daughter. It would be wrong for Jomier to take advantage of Annie’s dysfunctional relationship with her father to seduce her; but not wrong to respond to a psychic need which, though it might derive from that dysfunctional relationship, was now an unalterable feature of her adult personality.