Robin said, “Oh, sort of south-west. Dorset? Is where I grew up.”

“Dorset. Oh yeah, I heard of that,” said the barman, taking the dollar bill with a little twinkle of self-congratulation.

Robin turned and leant on the bar and scanned the room with a pretence of indifference. He watched a long-haired young man talking to an older businessman, who must just have come from work; making a point to him with hands jerked up and up in the air, and then, as the businessman laughed, smiling at him and bringing his hands to rest on his shoulders, the thumbs moving to a gentle caress behind his ears. Robin looked quickly away, and at the man on a barstool beside him, who he knew at once had been gazing at him with the same unsubtle fascination. He took in the glossy dark hair, the long humorous face, the legs apart in tight flared jeans. “I guess I must have been in Dorset when I was down in Plymouth,” he said.

“You might have passed through Dorset,” said Robin punctiliously; “though Plymouth itself is in Devonshire.”

The man smiled in a way that suggested he knew that. “I’m Sylvan,” he said.

Robin accepted the information broad-mindedly. “Robin, hi!” he said, and extended his callused rower’s hand.

“Oh, okay…” Sylvan raising his hand from his knee and complying with the courtesy; and smiling rather insistently as if to press the stranger to a quick glowing acknowledgement of something as yet unsaid. Robin knew what it was and hid his indecision, and the snug sense of power it gave him, in an English innocence.

“What took you to Plymouth?”

Sylvan looked down. “Oh, family. That kind of thing.” Then bright and intimate again: “What brings you to the Valley of the Sun?”

It was never easy saying these things to strangers. “Research, actually.” He slid the rest of the beer gently into the tilted glass. “Yeah, I’m doing some stuff on Frank Lloyd Wright?” He saw he’d already got the habit of the interrogative statement. He glanced up at Sylvan.