Lisa manoeuvred me into the seat next to him. At first I was saved from making conversation by the girl on his other side – he spread his attention thickly over her ears and mouth, and she laughed at his jokes and gazed at him admiringly when he let slip the smallest personal confidence. The man I had displaced joined Ray and Francis in a conversation about the chances of a bantamweight fighter I had never heard of called Sean Drummer. They slipped quickly into a technical patois that excluded the uninitiated. This arrangement left me free to watch the people who whirled around our table like colourful specimens in a tank full of tropical fish. I felt detached from their world, as much an observer as the child with his face pressed up against the glass of the aquarium, quite unaware of which ones were poisonous, of who was food for whom, seeing only an exotic and cold-blooded world of primal intrigue. Ray had his hand on Francis’s shoulder, testing his muscles with an air of masculine detachment. He asked him if he’d ever fought for money. Jessica had entranced the man called John, a lean and handsome Londoner in his sixties, who looked to me more like an ageing rock star than a businessman, with long grey hair slicked back to his collar. She was being masterful with him, telling him which shares to invest in, which part of Majorca to search for a villa, where to buy his shoes. She had assumed the tone that made every one of her opinions a statement of fact, and she paused only to listen or smoke. It must have been a long time since anyone had told him what to do. He expressed his delight in her company by tending to her every need – waiters were sent off in search of fresh fruit and clove cigarettes, and one returned with a tray bearing a mini bottle of Veuve Clicquot with a fluorescent straw poking out of the top. Jessica took it in her hand and sucked daintily on the end, looking up at him from under her fine brows as she did so, an incredibly alluring mixture of innocence and sophistication. I thought how much more beautiful she was than all these other girls, whose living was their looks. I caught myself staring, and shifted my gaze.

My luck did not last. The girl eventually excused herself to head to the toilets to take more cocaine (the line we had done in the hotel had worn off) leaving me alone, and Augustus turned his attention to me, partially rotating his great torso slowly in the narrow confines of the seat. He smiled broadly and put his arm around my shoulder. ‘So what do you think of the club? Nice, innit?’

‘It’s amazing,’ I said. ‘It makes me think of one of Gatsby’s parties.’

‘Who’s Gatsby?’ Augustus asked, his great brow creasing into mountainous ridges.

I realized my mistake, and tried to make my explanation a partial apology for bringing up something so pretentious. ‘Oh, he’s nothing, he’s just a character, a character from a book by someone called F. Scott Fitzgerald?’ My voice went up at the end, making the statement sound like a query.