Elias Kane was fifty-one and had the flat, tired quality of a man who has been extremely competent at something for a long time without ever enjoying it. He did not drink. He asked her three questions about the house and listened to all three answers, which put him ahead of everyone else at that table.
For the first forty minutes she talked to him about nothing at all — his daughter's A-levels, a bad holiday in Sardinia, the impossibility of parking anywhere in Harrogate.