‘So you want to know about the Night Climbers, do you?’ he asked.

‘The Night Climbers?’ I asked, the name sending a little tremor down my spine.

‘It’s a little club I started some time ago with a couple of friends.’

‘And who are your friends?’ I asked.

‘Just like-minded individuals,’ he said, waving the allusion above my head like meat over a starving dog.

‘I saw them down in the courtyard,’ I said, ‘two girls and a guy.’

‘Oh,’ he said, rather put out, ‘well, I suppose if you know who they are by sight there’s no harm in me telling you a little bit about them. Discretion is our watchword. I myself plan to be something of a public figure and prefer not to broadcast my exploits, but since you already know, and you’re an O.S. . . .’

My fear that he would tell me nothing was unfounded. He was quite willing to trade in his confidences for a moment of importance. When prompted, he gave up an excess of precious information like a geyser spitting pressurized oil up from the ground, and I thought at first that I must already have some special glow about me to warrant such attention. Michael, much mocked and maligned by the friends he sought to emulate, was really taking the opportunity to display his social plumage to an eager and inferior male. Whatever his motivations, this is still my first impression of them all, given a salacious tint by the lens of his gossip. They were sold to me perfectly as creatures of social fantasy. His fondness for his own voice, and mine for free food, meant that his dominance of the conversation was uncontested and total.

‘Francis, he has a rather interesting history. I’m sure you’ll hear it from someone else, so you might as well get the truth from me as a pack of lies from some dreadful gossip who barely even knows him. Francis’s father is Lord Soulford. Yes, that’s right. The Lord Soulford. I’ve been lucky enough to do some work with him myself at Conservative Central Office. Yes, another bottle of the Cabernet, please, and will you bring me some Dijon? In the late seventies and early eighties Soulford, or Manley as he was then, was rather a different man, no political ambitions, something of a playboy by all accounts, and of course enormously rich. Imagine, that prodigious intellect devoted entirely to furnishing his own pleasure. Of course he hid as much as he could from old Lord Soulford, who was quite an abstemious gent, but he couldn’t keep himself out of the papers for ever. Orgies will out. Well, he went off to New York for some time, ostensibly to do some work managing the family investments, but really to get away from the old man’s ire. Out there he behaved just as badly, until eventually he fell in love with this fashion model from Zimbabwe. Utterly unsuitable, utterly beautiful – Francis has photographs of her stalking the catwalks of Milan and Paris, and I defy any red-blooded male not to fall in love with her instantly. They married in secret in Las Vegas, honeymooned at the family villa in St Tropez, and the old man was none the wiser. That’s where I suspect Francis was conceived, in the south of France, so you see it really was a love match, and nothing to do with social obligation. Then some awful journalist snapped the two of them having breakfast on the balcony, and the whole story came out in the British press. Lord Soulford read about it on page two of The Times. Would you call this rare? I’m not sure I would. Perhaps I should send it back . . . Well, he phoned through to the family lawyers from the breakfast table, and had his only son quite excised from his will, and cut off his allowance completely, as well as having the locks changed on the apartment in New York. The two of them stuck it out for a while, living on the money she made from modelling; Manley sold a couple of the jewels his grandmother had left him, good pieces but not enough to support them for long. They kept on living like a king and queen you see, neither of them could quite acknowledge the change in their circumstances. By the time Francis was born, they were defaulting on the medical bills. I heard they had to smuggle him out of the hospital wrapped in a blanket. Are you enjoying the steak? It looks a little overdone to me, I prefer the blood and jus to seep out when you spear it with the fork. In the end Manley came back to his father. He couldn’t survive without money, and he wasn’t really fit to make any of his own. A brilliant man of course, but I always think ability of the financial sort the sign of a rather vulgar and debased intelligence. His ideas are infinitely better suited to the political stage, to the structure of the great machine than the workings of the individual cogs. He ran through Francis’s mother’s cash pretty quickly, and she couldn’t work again after the baby. I get the impression the modelling world’s rather cruel to those who fall out of fashion, if you’ll pardon the pun, and all her friends peeled away. In the end she went back to Harare, and took Francis with her. Manley had the marriage annulled, and married an earl’s daughter. Would you like another glass? Francis has two half-brothers by her, they’re charming but rather stupid. It’s a shame, because the elder one will get the title, and most of the money. Lord Soulford keeps Francis on a pretty tight leash with a generous monthly allowance. The annulment cut him off from the family trust.’