He gave me a bleak smile to make sure I understood that it was a rhetorical question.

‘You’re not a constituency,’ he said. ‘There’s no community leaders or lobbying group ready to crawl up my ass because somebody somewhere takes exception to a joke or just a slip of the tongue. If I was to, hypothetically speaking, call you a limey or a nigger – which one would cause you the most offence?’

‘Was he an embarrassment?’ I asked.

‘Do you know why you evaded that question?’ asked the senator.

Because I’m a professional, I thought. Because I spent a couple of years talking to morose drunks and belligerent shoplifters and people who just wanted someone to shout at because the world was unfair. And the trick of it is simply to keep asking the questions you need the answers for, until finally the sad little sods wind down.

Occasionally, you have to wrestle them to the floor and sit on them until they’re coherent, but I thought that was an unlikely contingency given who I was talking to.

‘In what way would he have been embarrassing?’ I asked.

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ he said.

‘I’ll tell you what, Senator,’ I said. ‘You tell me about your son and I’ll answer.’

‘I asked first,’ he said. ‘You answer my question and I’ll tell you about my son.’

‘If you call me a nigger you just sound like a racist American,’ I said. ‘And limey is a joke insult. You don’t actually know enough about me to insult me properly.’

The senator squinted at me for a long time and I wondered if I might have been too clever by half, but then he sighed and picked up his plastic cup.

‘He wasn’t an embarrassment – not to me,’ he said. ‘Although I think maybe he thought he was.’ He sipped his whiskey, I noticed, savouring it on his tongue before he swallowed. He put the glass down – rationing himself – I recognised the behaviour from my dad. ‘He liked being here in London, I can tell you that. He said that the city went on for ever. “All the way down” he said.’

His eyes unfocused, just for a moment, and I realised that the senator was phenomenally drunk.

‘So he was in contact with you?’

‘I’d arrange a phone call once a week,’ said the senator. ‘He’d call me every other month or so. Once your kids are out of high school that’s pretty much the best you can hope for.’

‘When did you last speak to him?’

‘Last week,’ said the senator. His hand twitched towards the whiskey but he stopped himself. ‘I wanted to know if he was coming back for the holidays.’

‘And was he?’

‘Nope,’ said the senator. ‘He said he’d found something, he was excited and the next time he saw me he was going to blow my mind.’