She turned to me, but I spoke first. ‘You’re allergic to dairy.’

She nodded happily. Meanwhile, Gary had noted every detail on his little pad. She still hadn’t finished. ‘Is the spinach cooked with salt?’ With infinite and, I thought, admirable patience, Gary ventured that yes, the spinach was cooked with a little salt. Terry shook her head, as if it were hard to believe in this day and age, ‘no salt when they cook it.’ I could not imagine how, even under this provocation, Patient Gary kept his cool. He hoped that would be possible. ‘It’s possible,’ said Terry. ‘No salt.’ By now I could see that even Gary, that laid-back boy from sunny California, was ready to sink his pencil deep into Terry’s neck and stand by, watching, as the blood oozed out around its tip. But he nodded, not trusting himself to give a vocal response.

He turned to me and we exchanged eye contact, recognising our alliance in that strange way that one can befriend a total stranger who has been a co-witness to impossible behaviour. ‘I’ll have the artichoke soup, a steak, medium rare and a green salad.’ He seemed almost bewildered that the process had been so speedy.

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

With the hint of a sigh, he was just moving away, when Terry spoke again. ‘Is there mayonnaise in your coleslaw?’

Gary paused. When he spoke again his voice had acquired the super-softness of a doctor’s when dealing with a potentially dangerous patient. ‘Yes, madam,’ he said. ‘There is mayonnaise in our coleslaw.’

‘Oh. Then forget it.’ She dismissed him with a slight, insulting flick of her hand and picked up her glass for another drink.

In justice, having been a silent witness for so long, I felt the need to intervene. ‘Terry.’ She turned, surprised perhaps that I should have an opinion. ‘There’s always mayonnaise in coleslaw.’

Again that little shake of the head in wondering disbelief. ‘Not in our house,’ she said and Gary made his escape.

Obviously, what this little vignette had told me was that Terry’s life in California was not Great! These bids to be different, this insistence on the power to change, to inflict absolute governance in the captive situation of a restaurant, are the recourse of those who feel no power to change anything elsewhere. Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there, because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment. How’s the family? Great! The new job? Best decision I ever made! The house? Terrific! All this, when the man in question is bankrupt, facing repossession, his children are on drugs and he is teetering on the brink of a divorce. There is no place in that town for the ‘interesting failure,’ or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in an upward-heading curve.

‘So, what happened to Greg? I heard you split up.’

This seemed to buck her up. ‘They talk about me, then? Over there?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, although it had in fact been thirty years since anyone I knew had mentioned her name – before Damian, that is.

‘I guess they still remember my party.’

They didn’t, but even I could see they might have. ‘Did you ever find out who did it?’

‘Not until a long time later. Then someone said it was that guy who married Lucy Somebody. Your friend. He knew the girl who was making the brownies and he mixed it in when she wasn’t looking. That was her story, anyway.’

Philip Rawnsley-Price. Much good did it do him.

She was back on track. ‘Greg’s OK. I don’t really see him now.’ She shrugged and poured another glass. We were nearly through the bottle and the first course hadn’t arrived. I wondered if she’d like to change to red. She would. My old pal Gary arrived with some food and scuttled away to fetch more wine before Terry could question him about the contents of her plate. She moved some items around disdainfully with her fork. ‘Jesus, I hope they don’t use cornflour on these.’

‘Why would they?’

‘Sometimes they do. The next morning I look like a racoon.’ How tiring it must be to live in an atmosphere of permanent danger. She started to eat with a certain amount of gusto, despite the risks. ‘Greg’s done pretty well, actually. He saw what was coming with the whole silicone thing and left Merrill Lynch to get into it. He understood the potential before most people did. Really. I should have stayed with him.’ She laughed wryly with, I detected, a certain amount of real feeling.

‘Why didn’t you?’ I was curious to know if she would tell me about the flighty millionaire who had tempted her from her vows.

‘Oh, you know.’ She gave me an inclusively immoral grin. ‘I met a guy.’

‘And what happened?’

Terry shrugged. ‘It didn’t work out.’ She shook her hair back with a soft, mirthless laugh. ‘Lordie, lordie, was I lucky to be rid of him!’

‘Were you?’

The glance I received in answer to this told me that she was, in fact, very unlucky to have been rid of the man in question and that in all probability he represented the Big Plan which would never now reach fruition. ‘Let’s not talk about him.’

Of course, I probably shouldn’t have probed this bit of her story. It was, after all, the failed part and therefore anti-Californian. I wondered how often she had regretted leaving Greg, now clearly as rich as Croesus. ‘How’s your daughter?’

‘Susie?’ She seemed quite interested that I had this information. ‘You remember Susie?’

‘Well, I remember you got married and had a baby straight away. And all much sooner than most of the rest of us.’

She was drunk enough by this time to grimace at the memory. ‘Damn right she was born straight away. Boy, I took a gamble there and, I may tell you, I very nearly lost.’ This was rather intriguing, so I said nothing and hoped for more. Which I got. ‘Greg was a big mixture back then. His growing up was completely Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee, going to the prom, dancing to the Beach Boys, you know the kind of thing.’

‘I do.’ In fact, the Americanism of my youth was powerfully evocative of a cleaner, more innocent world, when in Hollywood movies the whole world wanted to be American and the big issue, not only for Greg but for everyone, was who wore your pin. Yes, it was blinkered, but it was also charming in its fathomless self-belief.

Terry continued, ‘His parents were religious, very Midwest, and that was their existence. But Greg was also a Sixties boy, talking the talk, walking the walk. Smoking the dope. You know how it was.’ Of course I knew how it was. A whole generation waiting to see which side of the wall the world was going to jump. And half at least of them pretending that things were no longer important to them, when of course they were. ‘Anyway, he kept saying he was too young to settle down and couldn’t we just have fun…’

And couldn’t you?’

Her eye narrowed for a moment. ‘I needed a life. I needed to move on.’ The alcohol was making her honest. ‘I needed money.’

‘Your father had money.’

‘My father had a salary.’ The distinction, as we know, was not lost on me. ‘And I liked Greg. I thought we’d be happy. And I knew he’d never let his parents find out he had an illegitimate child.’ She paused.

‘That was the gamble.’

‘As I said. We’d been living together for a few months, which was, if you remember, pretty wild at the time. Then Greg’s bank posted him to Poland and he asked me to go with him. So I did. And he still couldn’t make up his mind. So I got pregnant.’

‘While you were there?’