If it came through there might be ten days of excessive politeness and artificial laughter and awkward silences, while they all tried to pretend he wasn’t a stranger. There might be slow sight-seeing tours of London in order to kill whole afternoons; they might want to show him “typically English” things to do, like nibbling fish and chips out of twisted newspaper, or whatever the hell else it was that typically English people did, and there would be repeated expressions of how nice everything was while they all counted the days until it was over.

If it didn’t come through he might never see them again; but then he had resigned himself to that many years ago, when it had mattered a great deal more—when it had, in fact, amounted to an almost unendurable loss.