‘Were you surprised when you made money? I mean, proper money?’ This seems an odd question to ask of a slight acquaintance after a forty-year gap. I can only tell you it didn’t feel odd at the time to either of us.

‘Everyone who is very successful will tell you that the initial response is entirely schizoid. One part of you thinks: All this for me? There must be some mistake! And the other greets immense, good fortune with: What on earth took you so long?’

‘I suppose self-belief is a key ingredient.’

He nodded. ‘So they tell us. But it’s never quite enough to prepare you for what’s happening. I made a lot of money when I sold the shops, but even so, when I did the sums for the projected profit on the first development I thought I’d put in too many noughts. I couldn’t believe it would generate so much. But it did. Then there was more and more and more and more. And everything changed.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘Oh, but I did. In those early years I went completely crazy. I was a jackass, a micro-manager to a truly demented degree. My home, my clothes, my cars, everything had to be just so. Looking back, I think I must have been imitating some notion of how posh people behaved but I got it completely wrong. I kept complaining in restaurants, and insisting on different shades of towel and different kinds of water in hotels. I wouldn’t go to the telephone when people I knew rang.’ He paused, bewildered, trying to understand his own remembered lunacy.

‘Why not?’

‘I thought that important people didn’t. It was crazy. Even the President of the United States goes to the telephone if he knows the person at the other end, but I wouldn’t. I had armies of assistants, working from sheaves of messages, with endless lists doled out to all and sundry. And I cancelled; boy, did I cancel. Last-minute duck-out. That was me.’

‘I’ve never really understood why people do that.’ I haven’t. And yet it is an increasingly common phenomenon among the would-be great.

He sucked at his lip. ‘Nor me, really. I think I felt trapped the moment I’d agreed to do anything, because the coming event, whatever it was, wouldn’t be under my control. Then, as it drew nearer I would begin to panic, and on the day I’d decide I couldn’t possibly go, usually for some nonsensical and irrelevant reason, and all the people I paid to kiss my arse would tell me that my host or hostess would understand, so I’d chuck.’

‘When did that end?’

‘When I’d been dropped by everybody. I still thought I was a sought-after guest, until one day I realised I was only ever asked to celebrity stunts, but never to where anything interesting was happening. Politicians, performers, writers, even thinkers, I wasn’t invited to meet them any more. I was just too unreliable.’

This admission fascinated me, since I have known so many film stars and television faces who’ve gradually removed themselves from society, or at least from the society of anyone remotely rewarding who is not a fan. As a rule they are quite unaware of it, and continue to think of themselves as pursued and desired when they are neither. ‘My grandmother used to say that you should never be more difficult than you’re worth.’

‘She was right. I broke her rule and paid. I was much more difficult than I was worth.’ His tone had gone through a kind of exasperation and was suddenly full of real pain. I looked at him. ‘That was when Joanna left me. It was understandable. She’d married me as a protest against the rules of the Establishment and suddenly she was living with a man who thought it was important to have his shirts made with a quarter of an inch difference in the length of the two sleeves, who could only buy his ties in Rome or have his shoes mended by a particular cobbler in St James’s. It was all so boring. Can you blame her?’

I thought it might be time to lighten the mood. ‘From what I remember of your mother-in-law, I imagine she rather approved of the change in you. That and the money, of course.’

He looked at me, as the waiter brought the first course. ‘Did you know Valerie Langley?’

‘Not well. I knew her as Joanna’s mother, not as “Valerie”.’

‘She has much to answer for.’ His tone was not jocular. I tried to think of something to add to this, but he hadn’t finished. ‘Did you realise that she only took us out to Portugal to split us up? Can you imagine a mother doing that to her own daughter?’

I could, really, when the mother in question was Valerie Langley, but there wasn’t much point in flinging petrol on to the flames, so I decided to move to different shores for a bit. ‘I gather you married again after you and Joanna split up. Is your second wife still around?’

He almost jumped, as if my words had distracted him from something he was busy with. ‘No. We’re divorced. Years ago.’

‘I’m sorry. It didn’t say that in your biography.’

Again he looked at me as if I were forcing him to discuss a parking ticket that had been issued to somebody else in 1953. ‘Don’t be sorry. Jeanne was nothing.’ Which was a chilling comment, but not just in its cruelty. Perhaps it said too much about his loneliness.

‘How is Joanna?’ He’d already mentioned her, so there didn’t seem to be any reason why I shouldn’t ask. ‘Are you on good terms these days?’

The question seemed to take him by surprise and return him to the present. My words had told him something beyond their content. ‘Why did you want to see me?’ he asked.

Suddenly I felt as if I had been caught shoplifting, or worse, putting a school friend’s torch into my pocket. ‘I’m on an errand, really.’

‘What errand? For whom?’

‘Damian.’ I hesitated, praying for inspiration. ‘You know he’s ill-’

‘And like to die.’

It almost amused me he should quote Richard III in this context. ‘Precisely. And he finds he’s interested in hearing about how his friends from those days…’ I wasn’t at all sure how to end this. ‘How they turned out. Whether life worked for them. You know. Rather as you were saying about your own past and how you like to talk about it.’ This last was a lame attempt to put them into the same boat.

‘All his friends? Or just some of his friends?’

‘Just some at this stage, and he asked me to help because he’s really lost touch with them and we used to be quite close.’

Which wouldn’t wash with Kieran and no wonder. ‘I’m astonished that you, of all people, accepted the brief.’

Naturally, this was a perfectly reasonable comment. ‘So am I, really. I didn’t mean to do it when he first asked me, but then I went down to his home to see him, and I felt…’ I tailed off. What had I felt that overturned a lifetime of dislike?

Kieran answered for me. ‘You felt you couldn’t refuse. Because death was pulling at his sleeve and you had only thought of him as young before you got there.’

‘That’s the sort of thing.’ It was the sort of thing, although that wasn’t the whole reason. Underlying any pity for Damian I may, I admit, have felt I sensed a kind of larger, general sadness growing in me, a sorrow at the cruelty of time. At any rate, Kieran had succeeded in making me feel awkward and undignified with my nosy enquiries and my bogus charity.

‘Which “some”?’

‘Sorry?’ The phrase sounded foreign. I couldn’t understand him.

‘Which “some” of Damian’s friends?’

I listed the women. He listened as he ate his cod’s roe, breaking the toast and pressing the pink squidge on to it with the kind of fastidious neatness that seems to tell of a man living alone. Not camp at all, nor fussy, but disciplined and neat, like a locker in an army barracks. He finished his plate before he spoke again. ‘Has this got something to do with my son?’

Of course, the words were like a punch in the gut. I felt quite sick and for a second I thought I was actually going to be sick. But at least I decided to end the dishonesty at once, since it was clear I was as mysterious to Kieran as a sheet of laminated glass. I took a breath and answered, ‘Yes.’