I decided to push my luck, since I had no viable alternative, but my confidence in a productive result was waning. ‘Well, to be honest, I’d rather talk directly to Kieran, if he’s got a spare moment.’ I thought the slightly insolent use of his Christian name would make me sound more convincing, but I am not sure this was correct. She hesitated, then asked me to spell my surname once again, and I was put on hold and forced to listen to a rather bad recording of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. This time I wasn’t sure what I would do if he didn’t want to see me. And in truth, I couldn’t imagine why he would. If he had any memory of me at all it would only be the faintest reminder of a rather stuck-up, spotty youth who had snubbed him at every turn. That, and the dreadful evening when we last saw each other. Of course, one of the great pleasures of success, especially when many people have dismissed you and your chances, is to seek out those same ignorami and force them to retract their earlier opinions. To make them acknowledge, in their eyes if not with their tongues, that they were totally and completely wrong about you. That you, in short, have made them look like fools. I could only hope that the idea of my swallowing humble pie would be amusing.

Then, to my surprise, there was a click and Kieran was on the line. ‘Good heavens,’ he said. ‘To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’ The words may have been trite, but it was easy to tell from their delivery that he had mellowed. His East London accent had softened but not in a pretentious way, and his tone was, given the facts, unexpectedly warm.

‘I’m surprised you remember me.’

‘Nonsense. I’ve followed your career with interest. I’ve even read some of your books.’

I smiled with relief that my task was once more rendered do-able. ‘Enough of this love talk,’ I said and it was his turn to laugh. But when he asked me what it was about I fumbled as, naturally, I hadn’t thought I would be talking so soon to the man in question and my story was not yet quite straight in my head.

Mercifully, he cut through my maunderings with an invitation. His lunches were taken for months to come, but he wondered if I might be free for dinner. ‘Or is it difficult for you to get away in the evenings?’

‘Not at all, I’m sad to say. What about you?’

‘I’m the same.’ So a dinner was indeed arranged, which, he suggested, might take place at the Savoy Grill since it was about to close for a couple of years of ‘renovation.’ This was unless I had an objection. Which I hadn’t. Like him, I felt that a famous restaurant of our joint youths that was about to vanish forever seemed like a good, even witty, place to revisit the past. We had a date.

The old Savoy has left us now, that illogically impressive mixture of Odèon and Belle Epoque, which has been such a beacon in my life from childhood and growing up, when I would be taken for tea by ancient aunts past debbing days, with balls and cocktail parties in the River Room, and through the intervening years, smiling and cheering at weddings and birthdays and every kind of private celebration, right up to the present, when I have served my time at all those festival lunches and award-giving dinners, with their predictable menus and back-slapping, manufactured gaiety. Not long after my dinner with Kieran the new owner closed its doors and auctioned off the contents, and it would be a long, long time before the revelation of the reconceived hotel. And even if the team has recognised the special place the Savoy has occupied in London hearts for over a century, since Richard D’Oyly Carte first dreamed his dream, even if they have tried to serve its history as honourably as they could, still the stamping ground of Nellie Melba and Diana Cooper, of Alfred Hitchcock and the Duchess of Argyll, of Marilyn Monroe and Paul McCartney, and all the rest of that glittering crew will have joined the palace of John of Gaunt that once stood on the site, and must henceforth trust to history books and memory.

I hadn’t visited the Grill for a while and when I got there, it was to find it had already been much altered from the fashionable rendezvous of my adolescence that lasted well into my adulthood. In the early Sixties, I used to go regularly with a disreputable cousin of my father’s who’d taken a shine to me, and who regarded the place as a sort of private club and would bring the most recent, luckless object of his fancy there for an orgy of oysters and dishonest vows. Naturally, he was a wonderfully dashing role model to an unattractive teenager with bad skin. On leaving the army in his forties, Cousin Patrick chose to live a short-term life, that is, to enjoy himself without putting down any roots or taking on any responsibilities. He was certainly very handsome and very charming, so this was more achievable than it might have been for some. My own mother adored him despite my father’s disapproval, but in the end I suppose the latter’s strictures about reaping what you sew were proved correct since our cousin’s fun-filled years of avoiding commitment left him to face a stroke and early death alone, proving once again, as if we needed any more proof, that we generally end up with lives that are the product of our choices.

Even so, he was an inspiration to me, since he accepted no rules or boundaries and, having been brought up by my very straight and fairly strict pater, this seemed to me like an empowering paradise. I remember once being in a restaurant with him and, finding it difficult to attract the waiter’s attention, Patrick reached round and picked up a stand, one of those whatnots that hold mats and menus and salts and peppers, and flung it the entire length of the room. It landed with a crash like a nuclear explosion that silenced the full, chattering space until you could have heard a pin drop, but instead of being reprimanded or ordered out on to the street, as I fully expected, the only tangible result was that the service improved enormously. There was probably a subversive lesson tucked in here somewhere, which my father would not have wanted me to learn.

As I walked in I thought of Patrick for a moment. I remembered him standing in that same doorway, checking the room with his lazy smile, to see if there were any pretty possibilities seated at other tables. One of the strangest parts of growing older being that ever-increasing Team of the Dead, who stand behind your shoulder and take it in turns to jump in and out of your head. A picture, a shop, a street, a clock that someone gave you, an ornament that came from this dead aunt or a chair from that dead uncle, and suddenly for a second they’re alive again, whispering into your ear. There is a religion somewhere in the world that believes we all die twice; once in the normal way and the second time when the last person who really knew us dies, so one’s living memory is gone from the earth. I subscribe to that and I thought happily of my old cousin that day, if only to note that the place had changed since he was there. The murals had gone and with them much of the atmosphere, while the sleek panelling, pale and smooth, which had been installed in their place gave the sensation of sitting in a giant cigar thermidor. I suppose these things come under the heading of ‘rebranding,’ that twenty-first-century snake oil for every ailment. Kieran was already in his seat when I arrived. We waved at a distance, shook hands when I drew near and sat.

As everyone knows, the ageing process never fails to shock when it has not been witnessed on a daily basis. The Kieran I knew had been a fresh-faced oik, with fake hair and a fake tan, who bore almost no resemblance to the elderly, senior man of affairs sitting opposite me. But if his face was a great deal older, nevertheless, as he approached his seventieth year, it was also finer than it had been in his youth, less blotchy, less puffy and infinitely more secure. The too-red cheeks were gone and the glossy highlights, taking with them the true colour of his hair, whatever it may have been, but leaving him a rather distinguished grey, like a model in an advertisement for Grecian 2000. The hair itself had stayed, the lucky stiff, and his eyes were not, as I recalled, small and piggy but curiously kind for someone who had made such killings in the savage world of property.