“I don’t know,” said Frances. “Just to talk things over. I don’t think he’ll get to eat in the kitchen, though.”

IT MUST HAVE been a very long lunch because it was late in the afternoon when the two of them wandered into the office, looking very relaxed. I didn’t trust myself to meet Johnny’s eye. I wondered if he would come over and kiss me or put his arm around me, do something to suggest what had happened, but he didn’t acknowledge me at all, so far as I could tell with my head down and pretending to concentrate. Instead I heard him talking to Frances in a low voice about a party that was coming up. At the same time I detected another presence close by me. I smelled a wave of aftershave and alcohol.

“How do you take your coffee?” David asked.

I looked around. He was wearing a fawn-colored suit made of a peculiar material that was probably rare, expensive and enormously desirable. “No milk, no sugar,” I said.

“That’s easy, then,” he said, and handed me the mug he was holding.

I expected him to join the others but he pulled up a chair and sat next to me. I sipped the coffee while he leaned over my desk. He picked up a piece of paper. It was just a summary of invoices with details of what had been received and not, paid and not, but he scrutinized it with a frown. He replaced it with a grunt I couldn’t interpret.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Far from it,” he said. “Looking at this, I can’t imagine what Frances and Milena were up to. But you’re in danger of turning this company into a going concern.”

“I’m just tidying up.”

He gave a languid smile. “That’s about ninety-nine percent of what it takes to run a business.” He looked across at his wife who was huddled in conversation with Johnny. “You’re wasted here,” he continued. “I could use someone who can do work like this.”

“It isn’t what I do for a living,” I said.

“You mean you want to get back to teaching a class of young hoodlums? Let me tell you, they’re not worth it.”

I felt I ought to leap to the defense of those kids, even if they didn’t exist; even if the person who was defending them didn’t really exist. “I don’t agree,” I said.

“You like teaching logarithms and trigonometry year after year?”

“Um—yes!” I replied wildly, praying he wouldn’t ask me anything technical. I knew about addition, subtraction, simple multiplication and even simpler division, and that, more or less, was it.

He ran his fingers through his thick, graying hair as if it was an architectural feature he was quietly proud of.