It had always been the same, whenever he’d worn a black tie. He had hired the dinner jacket and everything that went with it, even the shoes, which pinched. He had expected the discomfort with his feet, because they usually hurt, but he had hoped for more success with the suit. Inside the jacket he had found a raffle ticket for the Henley regatta, with a telephone number on the back. Perhaps there would be some compensation in the reply when he called the number.

Very early in the party Charlie had discarded his champagne, because the bubbles gave him wind and he genuinely didn’t want to fart and reduce the chances of his being invited again. But he hadn’t realised the combined disadvantages of not having a glass in his hand and looking as he did in a hired outfit.

Since he had entered the two-floored apartment off Eaton Square, in which a smaller party of people had already eaten and at which a larger number of guests were now arriving for an after-dinner party, several people had half turned to him, as if expecting him to be carrying a tray of drinks. Once, rather than interrupt the conversation of an angular, flat-chested woman who had gestured at him. Charlie had taken her empty glass so that she could gesticulate at a frowning man whose photograph Charlie recognised from one of those blown-up displays outside the Young Vic.

Charlie became aware that Willoughby had witnessed the episode with the angular woman and he wandered towards the Lloyd’s underwriter, who was standing immediately before the lift from the first floor to receive people as they arrived.

‘Sorry about that,’ Willoughby apologised. He was much taller than Charlie and stooped, attempting to minimise his embarrassing height. It gave him an odd, hunched-back appearance.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Charlie. He looked to where the woman had begun another hand-moving story. ‘She’s wasting her time,’ he added. ‘That guy’s a poof.’