The Jacquesson has yielded to a Sauternes. Even as Dyer sips it, he loathes himself. He knows that as soon as he’s had a couple of glasses, he will go along with the party. Yet he also has to drink to get through it. An evening like this is a long-haul flight. After half an hour he’s demented, with all his faculties poised to bolt, but by the end he’ll be exchanging addresses and telephone numbers, he will see they’re actually not so bad, his fellow passengers, they’re all pilgrims on the same journey, part of the same humanity. He’ll be one of them, even if he wakes up next morning with a rapidly beating heart, back to his old self, instantly feeling dread as he surfaces through the scum of his remorse: Was I rude, did I show how bored I was, did I bore on too much? But he won’t be able to hide. He has to face them at the school gates. He has to talk to them under the harsh light of sobriety, when he can’t remember how to live up to who he was the night before.

Aside from his hosts, who sat at each end of the gigantic mahogany table, Dyer knew none of the thirteen others present, some of whom appeared to be clients of Gilles. The only couple he thought he recognised – from a school concert in January – were the Cubbages. Ralph, from California, and his intense-looking wife Bonnie, lived down the street. It suddenly registered that Ralph was the person in the ‘Cal’ baseball cap who Dyer had seen that afternoon talking to Gilles on the touchline.

In obedience to Paula’s command, Dyer glanced around, ready to surrender himself to the evening. Silvi, whose pride in her talent for bringing people together was reflected in the trouble that she took over her placements, had whispered on their way downstairs: ‘I’ve put you between two single ladies.’ Dyer intended to start with the dark-haired woman on his right; he had followed her to the table slightly mesmerised by her two-inch yellow heels.

He has had love affairs since Nissa. Women like him. He listens to them and makes them laugh. They know he has a sense of humour about himself and pokes fun at his own puritanism. They are touched by the stripe of sadness in him which it’s easy to mistake for something smooth, round, solid and, if not necessarily complete, then centred – without recognising that it’s his ledge out onto the void.

But nothing since coming to Oxford.

‘Jocasta,’ dropping her iPhone into her lap and holding out a hand.

‘John.’

She was slender, in her dissatisfied forties, in a translucent flesh-coloured blouse. Her short dark hair stronger and healthier than her face, which was rather plain. One of those faces, his aunt would have said, that looks as though it’s been spat on and polished.