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‘It’s good.’ His old, cracked face coloured slightly. ‘Well, I’m alone in the flat all day. Oh, you’d be brilliant on it.’
    ‘No, no, it’s not me at all,’ said Henry.
    ‘Why not?’ said Hilary. ‘I think you should do it.’
    ‘Think how jealous Colin and Ben and Neil and Ginny and Gordon would be,’ said Ted.
    ‘Colleagues on the
Thurmarsh Evening Argus
,’ explained Denzil with a shudder.
    ‘I always thought you were a star,’ said Helen.
    ‘And all those funny people on the Cucumber Marketing Board that you told such funny stories about,’ said Celia Hargreaves.
    ‘Oh Lord, did I?’
    ‘Yes, and they never appreciated you, and they will when they see you on TV. Oh, you must do it.’
    ‘Am I thinking the same thought as you?’ asked Hilary, after all the guests had left.
    ‘I think you probably are,’ said Henry. ‘I’ll make it.’
    ‘Make it? Make what?’
    ‘The cocoa. I am sixty, after all, and we can’t expect miracles.’
    As they sipped their cocoa in their luxurious bed, Hilary said, ‘You must do that show, darling. I’ve realised that I have to do publicity.’
    ‘Yes, but that’s to support your publishers.’
    ‘It’s to support me. You must.’
    Wrong, Hilary. I mustn’t.

3
A Question of Salt
    ON 6 JUNE, 1995, Lord Harold Wilson was buried on the Isles of Scilly; the National Lottery operator, Camelot, paid its executive directors £677,000 in salaries and £358,000 in performance related pay; Bosnian Serbs freed one hundred and eight hostages; a Jewish policeman, the only Jew among two hundred in his division, told an industrial tribunal that he had been driven to bulimia by the taunts of his fellow officers; a Church of England report said that living in sin was no longer sinful; and Henry Ezra Pratt took part in his first recording of an edition of
A Question of Salt
.
    Why on earth had he agreed to do it? This could have been a nice ordinary cosy evening at the Café Henry. Why was he walking across the foyer of Main Reception at the BBC Television Centre, with a stomach full of large moths and a brick in his throat?
    Was it vanity? If it was vanity, why wasn’t he more confident? Even Hilary, with her history of withdrawals and depressions, was more confident than him.
    ‘Henry Pratt for
A Question of Salt
,’ he said in a nervy, squeaky voice.
    The receptionist looked through a list of names and couldn’t find him there.
    ‘How do you spell your name?’ she asked unpromisingly.
    ‘P R A T T.’
    ‘No. Sorry. I … Ah! There you are. Lurking under Jeremy Paxman.’
    She laughed. He tried to join in. She handed him a key. He looked at it blankly.
    ‘For your dressing room,’ she said, as to an imbecile.
    ‘Ah. I hadn’t …’
    ‘A researcher from the programme will fetch you and take you.’
    His heart leapt. He’d be seeing Nicky again. He didn’t want his heart to leap. It was ridiculous that it should leap.
    He wasn’t interested in Nicky.
    He smiled at a rather solemn, pompous man with a large nose, small eyes, heavy black eyebrows and a wig. Henry could never understand what possessed men to buy bad wigs. Who could they possibly fool?
    Mr Wiggy had a suit carrier, which he was holding level with his head so that it didn’t trail on the floor. He looked very uncomfortable. Just as Henry was smiling at him, he transferred the suit carrier to his other hand. He did not return Henry’s smile.
    Seated at one of the tables in the reception area was another man with a suit carrier, but his was folded easily over his arm. He was wearing expensive jeans and a leather jacket. He looked worldly, confident, cool.
    A tall, slim woman entered through the swing doors and went up to the desk. She had long legs, and hair that was pale without quite being blonde. She was wearing an expensive dark green trouser suit. She too had a suit carrier. What was this? Some consumer programme testing different makes of suit carrier?
    When Denise Healey entered in