Back in his house, doubts set in – not doubts about his feelings for Annie or Annie’s feelings for him, but whether he is up for an affair with a girl half his age. Will she want to go clubbing or to raves? Will he get on with her friends? Will he become a figure of fun like Professor Rath in The Blue Angel? Will he come up to the mark as a lover? His happiest imaginings are of hugging and caressing Annie, while the porno screenings make him uncomfortable. The question is not si vieillesse pouvait but si cocu pouvait. Since the trauma of his divorce, his loins have been largely quiescent. ‘Farewell, sweet prince,’ Jomier has said to his penis floating lifelessly in the bath: but the drowsy images of Annie desnudas, which started a flow of blood through the helicine arteries to the corpus cavernosa of his penis show that, unlike Hamlet, it is not dead. But enfeebled. The flow of blood is not what it once was. Is this a by-product of psychological emasculation or merely a symptom of age? How will he compare with Toby Pierson or Molly’s brother whose name Jomier cannot now remember? For years he had made love to a woman (Tilly) who had had no yardstick against which to measure his skills as a lover. And when she had finally found her yardstick, she had clearly found him wanting. Was Max ‘better in bed’? Or was he more exciting simply because he was different? Like all young women of her generation, Annie will have a stack of yardsticks. Can Jomier’s skill and experience compensate for a lack of brute virility? Or can brute virility be restored?

Jomier makes an appointment with his doctor. He explains his anxieties. The younger man listens sympathetically. He knows something of Jomier’s troubles: he is the one whom Jomier pesters with his cancer scares. He now takes Jomier’s blood pressure. It is normal. He recommends Viagra. He can prescribe it but warns Jomier that the cost cannot be met by the National Health unless it could be shown that a relationship was imperilled by his erectile dysfunction. In other words: would his partner leave him because he failed to provide her with sexual satisfaction? Would it break up a family? No. The family is already broken; his partner has gone. It is precisely this that has led to the erectile dysfunction. Before that the erectile functioning was fine.