‘What about you, James?’ Jessica asked. Her arm lay along the length of my thigh.

‘I don’t really know. I want to spend mine on . . . pleasure.’

‘Pleasure?’ Jessica said, amused.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I must discover what it is. I’ll find something that makes me happy, and then I’ll pour my money into that.’

Jessica rubbed her cheek against my hand like a cat. Perhaps it was the sleazy brilliance of the hotel suite. Perhaps it was the sense that we had beaten everyone and everything, or a simple desire to indulge in every possible excess. It was context, the same force that allows us to watch a man in tights at the ballet and think it elegant, that enables a sane and rational man to stab another in the stomach when their two countries are at war. It seemed reasonable, natural, inevitable for me to break the film, the thin membrane between the physically intimate and the sexual, and slide my hands around her face from behind, gently penetrating her mouth with one of my fingers. I felt my fear of rejection dissolve in her mouth as I sensed a fledgling pressure; she sucked the tip, a slight instinctual pull like a baby’s lips around a nipple. As I touched her, I caught Francis’s eyes. He slid off the sofa so that he was kneeling in front of her, a supplicant asking for forgiveness for what he had said and for what we were about to do. She leant her head back exposing her throat, a gesture of willing vulnerability. She slid smoothly into submissiveness, but kept one tiny measure of veto, like a woman lowering her tanned body into warm clear water down the swimming-pool ladder, keeping her neat hair above the surface, her neck prim and straight. Her yielding to every pressure had a strange logic; it was the natural compensation for her daylight dominance. Francis took off his shirt, sliding his shoulders out one at a time. I put my hand on his body. He gave me a smile of licence. His flesh felt different to hers, he was composed entirely of skin and lean meat, his shoulder muscles rising like healthy swelling on the bone. His body felt like silk wrapped around sun-warmed stone. Hers was soft and yielding and strangely cool to the touch, contoured like a landscape under snow. I put my hand inside her corset and held one perfect breast. I pinched suddenly, and heard her gasp in a way that made me rip the fabric open.