He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t really have one. Nothing worthy of the name. The odd arrangement for my comfort, but nothing more than that for many years now. I’m not at all social.’

‘You were when I knew you,’ I said. I was still transfixed by the thought of the ‘odd arrangement for my comfort.’ Golly. I resolved to steer clear of any attempt at clarification.

There was no further need to keep things moving. Damian had got started. ‘I did not like the world you took me into, as you know.’ He looked at me challengingly but I had no comment to make so he continued, ‘but, paradoxically, when I left it, I found I didn’t care for the entertainments of my old world either. After a while I gave up “parties” altogether.’

‘Did you marry?’

‘Once. It didn’t last very long.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I only married because I’d got to that age when it starts to feel odd not to have married. I was thirty-six or -seven and curious eyebrows were beginning to be raised. Of course, I was a fool. If I’d waited another five years, my friends would have started to divorce and I wouldn’t have been the only freak in the circus.’

Was she anyone I knew?’

‘Oh, no. I’d escaped from your crowd by then and I had no desire to return to it, I can assure you.’

‘Any more than we had the smallest desire to see you,’ I said. There was something relieving in this. A trace of our mutual dislike had surfaced and it felt more comfortable than the pseudo-friendship we had been playing at all evening. ‘Besides, you don’t know what my crowd is. You don’t know anything about my life. It changed that night as much as yours. And there is more than one way of moving on from a London Season of forty years ago.’

He accepted this without querying it. ‘Quite right. I apologise. But, truly, you would not have known Suzanne. When I met her she was running a fitness centre near Leatherhead.’ Inwardly I agreed that it was unlikely my path had crossed with the ex-Mrs Baxter’s so I was silent. He sighed wearily. ‘She tried her best. I don’t want to speak ill of her. But we had nothing at all to hold us together.’ He paused. ‘You never married in the end, did you?’