Silence. The only slight sound is Fred rubbing the plastic sweet wrapper between his fingers at intervals of equal duration. As they alternate, the brief intervals lay down an unmistakable musical rhythm.

The Queen’s emissary puts a cigarette in his mouth, raises the lighter to it, then remembers the ban on smoking.

“Forgive me, maestro,” he stammers out in a last awkward attempt, “but the Queen could take this badly. She isn’t used to being rebuffed.”

Still seemingly engrossed in the newspaper, Fred Ballinger suddenly stops playing with the sweet wrapper.

“She’ll learn to live with it. There are far more important things than my ‘Simple Songs’.”

The emissary gets up, disconsolate: “Well, I’ll report back what we’ve discussed. Goodbye, maestro.”

He sets off, his two assistants following. As they move away, they reveal a man at another table behind them who looks as if he has listened to the whole conversation.

He is Jimmy Tree, thirty-four years old, from California, a Hollywood star, and handsome in a dissolute looking way. He is eating steak and chips at this hour of the morning. He looks wasted – several days’ growth of beard, dark glasses, his casual clothes all crumpled – and is trying to hide the fact under a baseball hat that does him no favours.

*

As the three Englishmen circumnavigate the swimming pool to find the way out, one particular figure catches the attention of the royal emissary.

There is a man floating in the pool. Only his swollen face sticks out of the water. He looks South American, his hair dyed an unreal yellow, fleshy lips. He is about fifty, his black eyes are intelligent, his features well worn, but lined with deep furrows that look incongruous in a man still in middle age. He is gazing into empty space.

The emissary stares at him and in a low voice asks one of his assistants, “Have you seen that man? Is that him?”

The two assistants turn to look at the swimming pool and recognise him immediately. They become excited.

“It certainly is him!”

“My God, it really is!”

*

The three carry on walking even though they cannot stop glancing back at the South American in the pool who – with the help of a woman of about forty and three pool attendants against whom he is resting all his dead weight – is now getting out of the water and making his way up the easy-access steps. To him, however, they seem insurmountable.

This is because, as we watch him gradually get out of the pool, we realise the man is extraordinarily obese and has immense difficulty walking. Breathless with the effort, this charismatic and cumbersome figure sits on the side of the pool. His arms are tattooed with the faces of famous heroes from equally famous revolutions.

The attendants leave. The forty-something woman with a kindly and patient face seems to be his partner. She sits next to him and starts to rub his hair with a towel, taking loving care of this huge whale of a man.