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there. He was the only friend I still had from my school days. All my other real friendships, all six of them, had been made at Oxford. Once every two years Ashley took me out to dinner in London. Once every two years I took him out more modestly in Oxford. His wife didn't come. It worked better that way.
    I was a man so socially inept in the presence of women that my evenings with my oldest friend went better when his wife was not present. What on earth was I doing asking a darts groupie out to dinner?
    Darts. That was what we would talk about. Avoid Wittgenstein, concentrate on darts, and everything would be all right. In my adolescent days, my desperate days of puberty, paralysis and pimples, I had saved my pocket money for a correspondence course on conversation! I'd soon given it up, it depressed me so much, but the one thing I remembered – I'd even tried it at the time – was to talk about what the other person is interested in. It hadn't worked very well. I would ask a question and then forget to listen to the reply, or hear half of it but miss vital clues, which would rapidly become apparent, so that I ended up looking stupid. I remember overhearing one of Rachel's radiologist friends saying, in a pub in Pangbourne, 'He's so clever, how can he always be so dim?'
    I felt better, after that, for at least a minute or two. I examined my face again, wondering if she could possibly find it kissable. Well, it wasn't grotesque, just weary, just lived in. The cheeks were sunken; I had the pallor of celibacy upon me; I should have had my teeth whitened; but no, I wasn't too awful, and if I'd looked after myself I might even have seemed moderately attractive.
    Then I went back into my room and unzipped my bag. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had nothing to unpack. I had no spare clothes. I hadn't expected to stay away for an extra day. I had never stayed away for an extra day in my life. I had no spare shirt, no clean socks. My underpants were grey with age – rather like me, in fact, although I had always thought that it was their dogs rather than their underpants that owners came to resemble.
    I took a taxi to Regent Street, and bought a complete set of matching clothes in a suitably old-fashioned shop. It was too late to start trying to be fashionable. I needed things I would be comfortable in. The attendant was Asian but very very English. Oh, it's so you , sir,' he kept saying. 'It's you to a T.' I bought everything, wincing at the cost, wondering if I had taken leave of my senses. My only indecision was, in fact, over the underpants. In the end I bought jockey shorts for the first time in my life, feeling really rather bold, for I suspected that the Dashing Dane and the Mercurial Man Mountain from Merthyr would both be jockey shorts men. The attendant was utterly charming throughout, as indeed he should have been, for this must have been the easiest sale of his life.
    I went back to my room, stood in the tiny bath, had a handheld shower that only trickled, washed my hair, discovered that there wasn't a hair dryer, carefully dressed myself from neck to toe in my new clothes, looked in the mirror, and saw a man who looked like a model in an advert for insurance for the senior citizen.
    Any self-assurance that I still had melted away completely. I felt a sudden sickness in my stomach and an excruciating pain in my balls. 'We aren't used to this. What the hell's going on?' they were saying. I had to go and lie down.
    She wouldn't come. She would. She wouldn't. I blew metaphorical dandelion heads and didn't know which I dreaded most – her coming or her not coming.
    I did consider the option of not turning up myself, but I knew that I couldn't do that to her. There are things that a gentleman can't do, and, anachronistic though it was, I still thought of myself as a gentleman.
    But why oh why had I asked her out?

FOUR
    L'Escargot Bleu was dismayingly quiet – just three tables taken. Oh, how I wished I had known of