The breakdown of Jomier's marriage 20 years before the story begins has left him pessimistic about finding happiness through the love of a good woman. His heart has been broken by his former wife's move to a richer, better-looking and easier-going man. That the usurper was a millionaire Swiss-American investment banker with a house in Phillimore Gardens links Jomier's personal loss with that of a whole class of Englishman — distressed gentlefolk — who can no longer afford to shop in Jermyn Street and the Burlington Arcade and feel that they have been "expelled from those elegant Georgian and Regency streets and squares where Sir Pitt Crawley walked with Becky Sharp" by Arab sheiks and Russian oligarchs. 

Who is responsible for Jomier's banishment to Hammersmith? Jomier blames his wife Tilly who, when she divorced him, was awarded two-thirds of the value of their house in Notting Hill and half his pension fund. But is Tilly personally culpable or are women in general the source of male misfortune? Didn't Eve, created as Adam's helpmate, turn out to be a hindrance — the source of all human misfortune — when she ate the forbidden fruit and persuaded Adam to do the same? Have not women since time began manipulated men with the promise of love and sexual ecstasy for their own ends? Even God is fooled by women. David gets the blame for taking Bathsheba from Uriah the Hittite. But Bathsheba surely knew that David could see her naked in her bath. Why else would she take it on the roof in full view of the palace? 

What would Bathsheba's contemporaries — say the members of a ladies' tablet-reading group in Jerusalem in 1000BC — make of David and Bathsheba's behaviour? Much the same, Jomier supposes, as members of a women's book group in Kensington in the 1980s. An affair? Everyone does it. Divorce? With a husband like Uriah/Jomier, understandable. Pinching someone else's husband? These things happen. Women, in Jomier's view, always stick up for women when it comes to their relations with men. 

However, even if patterns of behaviour from antiquity are readily recognisable in modern times (see Ferdinand Mount's new book, Full Circle), there have been short-term undulations. Significant changes in manners and morals have taken place in Jomier's lifetime. In the 1950s, Britain was still a hierarchical society in which one betrayed one's place in the social order by one's accent and clothes. Sexual behaviour was severely constricted. Catholic schools taught that those who had sex outside marriage and died unrepentant would end up in hell. Active homosexuals risked jail. Girls played safe when it came to sex: they did not want to get pregnant or acquire a "reputation". Few of them went to university: most settled for an O Level in Domestic Science. The age-old paradigm of a husband as a hunter-gatherer (even if the hunting and gathering took place at the Pru) and the wife as homemaker was still in force. 

Then came the reforms and revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, when the distilled wisdom of Moses, Jesus and all the moral authorities of the Judaeo-Christian tradition was junked in favour of modern prophets — Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer. Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex replaced Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ as bedside reading, and Dr Spock's Baby and Child Care usurped Lord Halifax's Advice to a Daughter on the kitchen dresser. That connoisseur of fine wines and fine women, Roy Jenkins, "reformed" the laws that governed our sexual behaviour. The very concept of moral authority was ridiculed by the Cambridge satirists. R. D. Laing persuaded us that the bog-standard nuclear family was a very bad thing.