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course in Devon. His second wife had taken up with a man who made a decent living wearing a wetsuit and flippers to retrieve golf balls from the course’s ponds and water hazards, the biggest of which was near the end of their garden, and had moved in with him.
    He’d given in to lassitude, gloom and resignation then. Let the grey come through in his hair. Piled the weight on. Eating the same food sitting at the same window table in the My Blue Heaven village Italian six nights a week while Tony and Aldo and Giuseppe smoked and fingered their watches and watched ear-splitting football on the television. Seafood linguine and escalope of veal every night for he didn’t want to remember how long. Bottle of the house red. Glass of limoncello with the sharp-as-hell almond biscuit things that shredded his gums.
    It was the first time for years that he hadn’t had Jackie there to deflect attention and at least simulate conversation. At that time, for the first time in all the years they had been together, Jackie was having to earn his own living. He opened a caravan park for short-stay vans. He built the lavatory block and put down the soil pipe himself; but they kept disappearing without paying, even when he padlocked the main gate overnight. That had cleaned him out. Next he’d gone on the road, peddling bar sundries and colour-coded boning knives and the new regulation anti-bacterial chopping boards to pubs and restaurants, with second-hand books at car-boot sales as a sideline. He would come round toRay’s and sit at the kitchen table over a beer, stacking his takings in columns.
    This is not something that would have happened if Charmian had still been there. Charmian had never got on with Jackie. She never saw the point of him; Charmian had always refused to be able to see what Jackie was for. And as she found her place in the gin-and-Jaguar hierarchy slipping as Ray’s face faded from the television and the invitations to high-profile occasions trickled to a halt, things came to a head.
    Ray had built up a reputation for being a big tipper. ‘When you’ve got nothing, act like you’ve got loads’ had been his motto when he set out, and it was what he still believed now that, after a lifetime of free spending, he was having to pull his horns in. It had always been their arrangement that Jackie carried a substantial float of cash to tip the maître d’, tip the waiter, tip the cloakroom girl, tip the taxi driver. Tip, tip, tip, with Charmian, when she was there, scowling blackly in the background at all times.
    Ray was always telling Jackie to pick up theatre tickets for this one, send a bottle of Jack to that one, collect one of the cars from the garage, send flowers to somebody else. And then Charmian grabbed her moment when she saw Jackie taking a note from a stack of several notes wedged under a framed photograph in their bedroom and accused him of stealing from the house. Pointless to say he was only doing what Ray had told him to do (which Ray confirmed). Equally pointless, when Charmian demanded to know why he hadn’t come and asked her, to remind her that she questioned every purchase and every expense, wanting to know why it was bought, where, for how much, and for whom.
    But Charmian, it turned out, was already having secret moonlight meetings in the bunkers with Gavin, her flippered golf-ball retriever, by then. So Jackie was soon back round, letting himself in with his key, counting his coins at the kitchen table like aback-street busker; while Ray, greying, balding and surplus to requirements, slumped disconsolately inside his neon tan. Not so much Don Juan and Sancho Panza, more Bob and Terry (or Terry and June, as Jackie liked to say). Coram and Jennie, a knife-throwing act they used to tour with. (He ended up winging her with a tomahawk one night at the Palace of Varieties, Leicester, after too much to drink at the end of the first house.) Mutt and Jeff. Both of them running on the rims.
    It was soon