A moment passed while Saskia re-calibrated her conversational brain for this kind of highly layered and ironic talk. In some ways it was more difficult than learning a foreign language. Which was sort of the point; you couldn’t be part of this social class unless you got it. "Bob"—Robert Watts, the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor of London—was a teetotaler. He had blown up a marriage and a job by drinking too much, then sworn off the booze and put his life back together and gotten married to Daia Chand, a British journalist. The assertion by Mark Furlong—a trusted member of Bob’s inner circle—that he’d been incapacitated by too much free Beaujolais on the Gulfstream was under no circumstances to be taken at face value. It was, first of all, a joke that derived its humorous payload from being so utterly outrageous in its falsity. But for the hearer to get the joke they’d have to know Bob at least well enough to know that he was—extremely unusually for a man in his role—an absolute teetotaler. Anyone so ill-informed or credulous as to actually believe this slander would be left out in the cold, operating on bad information. In due time they might work out that they’d committed the monstrous faux pas of taking at face value what had been meant as an ironic witticism and have the good grace to throw themselves in front of a Tube train at Bank. Further embroidering on all this was Mark’s specification of Beaujolais as the drink in question, that being seen, by a certain class of drinker, as an inexpensive and faddish vintage for lightweights. The mention of the Gulfstream was a lovely touch. Mark was basically remarking on how absurd it was for people to travel that way. So the underlying reality was that Mark was a profoundly decent man who knew and loved Bob but couldn’t bring himself to say as much.