She exhaled. ‘Pais de santo,’ she repeated, rolling the words around. ‘I’ll tell you something, when you hear it you’re going to laugh. I was once told by a fortune teller –’ and she pushed back her chair – ‘that my sense of humour is really very, very amusing.’

He drank his wine. The claret, at least, was good. ‘This,’ Gilles had promised when pouring it, ‘would loosen the morals of ancient Greece.’

Over her voice, fragments of male conversation.

‘It’s his vulgarity that is so goose-pimpling, the little vagina shapes he makes with his hands, the phallic ignorance.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ve still got my marbles. Despite what Athens would like!’

‘The region was sliding into war until that deal was signed.’

Jocasta was telling a story that involved a man in Hong Kong who had treated her badly, and a speedboat. He gave up the attempt to listen.

He heard Gilles saying, ‘Only two people have had their name linked to a month: Augustus and Julius Caesar.’

Beside him, Jocasta played with the napkin ring as if it were a precious amulet.

‘Does this story amuse you?’ Her dull pale cheeks. The outrage of a star whose whims were suddenly denied. He could see her going for someone with her Vampire Vape flavoured e-cig.

Dyer, ignoring the sinister possibilities of tone, ‘Infinitely.’

The arrival of the main course interrupted them.

The person on his other side, in a short-sleeved aubergine dress, was saying something to the man on her left. She turned to Dyer.

‘Do you ever do that?’

It was the chestnut-haired woman.

‘Do what?’

‘Hide something in order that you know where it is only to forget where you’ve hidden it.’ Just before coming here tonight, she said, she had sat on her glasses – tucked for safekeeping behind a cushion. She looked at him dourly out of a warped bronze frame.

‘All the time,’ said Dyer. It was what his mother had done.

She had a slight lisp, like a dimple in her voice, and the irregular teeth of the English middle class. Straight shoulder-length hair, intelligent pale oval face. If Dyer had to describe his type, it wouldn’t be her.

Her name was Miranda. She lived in a house at the end of the road with her mother, who had dementia. ‘She’ll step out in the evening and hail a cab and tell it to take her anywhere.’ Once it took her to Malvern. ‘I had to write a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds.’

An educated woman in her fifties, she was divorced, like so many of her friends. She was still unresolved about the precise sequence. ‘A lot of women marry what they can handle, not what they want.’

‘Who did you marry?’

‘Someone I couldn’t handle – who do you think?’