It enabled him to travel extensively, although that freedom brought with it personal restrictions, chief among them a difficulty in establishing permanent relationships; there had been someone, a few years earlier, with whom he believed himself to have been in love – although now he was no longer sure – but against whom he felt no resentment or disappointment for refusing to put up with his too frequent absences, and abandoning him for someone else to whom he believed, and certainly hoped, she was now very happily married. They still exchanged Christmas cards: last year’s had featured a family photograph that included a baby girl. In reality it had been the drunken self-pity that Rebecca had refused to put up with. He’d seen the announcement of her second marriage in the Daily Telegraph. And the birth announcement. He certainly didn’t feel any resentment against her walking out on him as she had; he’d have done the same in her circumstances.

‘That’s sad,’ responded Alyce, although not offering an explanation for the wedding band now covered by her other hand.

‘Not for Rebecca – that was her name,’ further tempted Jordan. ‘She’s got a husband and a baby and a proper life, not someone whose existence is regulated by airline schedules.’ Or, after the bankruptcy, the availability of a gin bottle, he remembered.

‘Sad for you,’ she insisted, still without volunteering more.

‘But not today!’ declared Jordan, briskly. ‘Today I am on vacation and we’re having lunch together and I am no longer lonely.’

Alyce hesitated and for the briefest moment Jordan thought she was going to change her mind and decline the belated invitation. Instead she said, ‘No. Now neither of us are lonely.’

Jordan did order a whole bottle of wine, a grand cru Chablis, and took time consulting the menu with Alyce, who followed his recommendations. He’d seen a film version of Pride and Prejudice and speed-skimmed enough of Sense and Sensibility to maintain a conversation about Jane Austen and her books -his familiar, never-yet-failed technique now fully on track – and went easily into his well practised repertoire of fictitious venture capitalist and investment anecdotes. She laughed on cue but once more brought him up short after the third story by saying, ‘Your experiences seem much more amusing than my husband’s.’