And what of Mrs Olly, if she is who I think she was, or might have been? The girl at the bar might not have seen much of my face in the forty-watt gloom and I might have given her a false name, if any, out of habitual caution. ‘Don’t be a grouchy bear,’ she laughed, I seem to remember, mopping up the spilled drink on my trouser-leg. ‘Tighter, Daddy Bear, tighter!’ she cried, at a climactic moment, I suddenly recall. ‘Hold me tighter.’ Funny how memory flashes up fragments and withholds the essence. I have no image of the girl, no name; all I know is that she has a thing about teddies and grizzlies.

Perhaps I was one of a caravanserai of closing-time pick-ups that she scored in pursuit of some ursine ideal, a grail that (if she is the same person) has attained marital apotheosis in fuzz-faced Olly with the flaky skin. Her congress with me, fleeting as it was (if indeed it was), was but an overture to Olly’s happy-end opera. If she is anything like the impulsive young women I read about in the Daily Mail, she will have had dozens of flings before selecting a life-partner. In the average modern woman’s busy sex-life, a tipsy indiscretion with a total stranger would barely register on her score sheet. It is only I, with an archaic set of compromised fidelities, who find the encounter worth mentioning at all. My moral mountain was, for her, a molehill. Speaking of which, a cell of tactile memory calls up a tiny brown mole that greeted my caress to the undercurve of her jaw. Is that a wrinkle on your chin, Sandra, or a cosmetic surgeon’s scar? Stop staring, idiot, you’re making her uncomfortable.

Checking my pulse, I chit and chat to my fellow judges on common green-room topics. Wasn’t that Czech girl smashing in the Proms? Why did what’s-his-name resign at Covent Garden? Was it the booze, or the boys? Mrs Olly flickers amiably around the periphery. Is she avoiding me? And what exactly is bothering me – the fear she might identify me and demand another bump on the bouncy frame, or the regret that a woman who once came alive to my practised touch cannot see the extant spark behind my derelict exterior? Either way, the anxiety is affecting both my angina and my stomach, which cramps with tension. Good golly, Mrs Olly, can we clear this up before I suffer a cardiovascular episode? Watch out, she’s heading this way.

‘A quick word, Mr Chairman, before we go in?’ Her breath brings out sweat beads on my cold ear as she outlines my duties in the hours to come. I steal a peek at her features and see nothing beyond dutiful formality. So that’s it: a self-deluding fantasy on my part of wishfully misplaced identity. Pathetic, really.