This morning, he’d accepted the idea that he’d be going home without a meeting, but he was too tired and subdued to go outside again. He’d loafed in his hotel room, curtains drawn, and tried to mute the city noises with his pillow. After a few hours, the telephone had rung and it was Alice, asking, ‘Can you make it here by noon? We just got word: he left Falaise this morning.’

So he’d put his clothes on and gone straight down in the lift with his portfolio. There’d been a strange electric thrum about the Village when he came on to the street, a fatty engine heat that spread from whirring units in the windows. Everywhere that slow parade of traffic, crowding him. He’d caught the 6 to Lexington and walked the rest of the way to the Plaza. There was time for one more cigarette to calm his nerves before he had to go back up those steps, beyond the smiling doormen to the lobby, with his foolish hopes revived, made lambent in his heart again.

*

When the great man came into the living room, his arms were laden with fresh flowers – bouquets of tulips, freesias, hyacinths, all bundled up in cellophane – and he was trailed by Mrs Wright, who carried two more bunches of the same. His topcoat was still on and so was his flat mushroom of a hat. He wore a long black scarf looped round his collar like a priest’s stole and his cane was hooked upon his wrist. For a man in his late eighties, he moved well. There was a poise to him, a self-possession. He was muttering to his wife in a strained voice, completing a discussion they’d begun out in the hall – ‘I’ll write her back in a few days. I’ve found Miss Lee is quite adaptable’ – and she hummed at him and said, ‘Don’t let her make you feel beholden. The publicity they get from you alone should be enough.’ They both came striding in, so focused on themselves they didn’t notice Charlie by the window. Somewhere, telephones were ringing – three of them at once, as far as he could tell – and none was being answered. The Wrights seemed unperturbed by this. ‘If only she’d accept that as a quid pro quo,’ the great man said. ‘I’ll talk her round. I always do.’

Charlie waited to be introduced.

There’d been a restless energy about the suite since Alice Kirsch had brought him up. For over half an hour, her colleagues had been stepping in to ask for her opinion or to cross-check certain points in documents. Tall men in suits with ties tucked in their shirt fronts; little men in waistcoasts; stringy men in pullovers and well-pressed trousers; and all of them with the same harried look, the same inchoate growth of whiskers, pink below the eyes. Each time, she’d had to say, ‘Excuse me for a moment, Charlie,’ leaving him to marinate in apprehension. He’d sat there, getting more and more impatient, turning the film canister in circuits on his lap.