The current Mrs George Best, a 26-year-old former air hostess, is standing on the sidelines watching her husband do what he does best. They run up to him, they pass it to him and he's off with it. The dexterity! The speed! No one can touch him. It's in! It's a signature! And another! And another!
"I support Chelsea," Alex Best tells me, "although I don't think I could watch a match through to the end."
We're in a bookshop in Oxford Street and George, casual in a white Aertex top and blue Umbro trousers, is signing copies of his test authorised biography. "All right. Cheers," he says about 200 times, although when an elderly woman who has queued for an hour wants to describe how, all those years ago, his face and legs decorated her son's bedroom walls, he leans forward sweetly to catch every word and then chortles "Poor you".
A little girl of about eight keeps sliding up under the rails: "Georgie: where did you get that?" she says nodding at a copy of the book. And then later, "Georgie, where did you get that?" pointing at his glass of white wine.
He gets it from his wife, whose job it is to keep it filled. ("Alex," he calls in some panic every 15 minutes or so, flicking his head towards his empty glass.) She's pin-thin with long, cream hair and very brown skin. She says it's from the garden, but there are suspicious orange marks between her fingers. She's wearing buttock-tight white jeans, high gold shoes and a camouflage-print singlet. She's standing by the "How To" shelves and occasionally spots a title that takes her interest. "Bluff Your Way In Tax!" she says. "That would be a good one."
"The Management Guide To Understanding Behaviour - ah!" She likes Jilly Cooper - Rivals and Riders, though not her most recent "which was rubbish".
It's a relief all round that George has turned up. He has a habit of "going on the missing list" as he puts it. He has missed training sessions; he has missed matches; he has missed his own birthday parties; in 1995 he even missed his first scheduled wedding to Alex ("He has been on a two-week bender and has turned into a monster", she told the Sun at the time - although she forgave him enough to marry him two weeks later). He has also done bunks in middle of interviews, which is why I abandoned a plan to talk to him somewhere more salubrious and, when the public signing was over, secured him in a back room of the bookshop. No windows. An alarm on the door.
SO there he is, sitting on a stained office chair, surrounded by empty boxes and remaindered books: the man who in the 1960s and early 1970s was arguably the greatest, the most glamorous, footballer in the world. He was "the fifth Beatle", the first dribbling superstar, the young Northerner who arrived at Manchester United at the age of 15, eight stone and crying with homesickness every night, who learned to play like a god on the pitch and a devil off it. For when there wasn't the football, there were the boutiques ("George Best Rogue" of Manchester) and the nightclubs (he opened a den called Slack Alice), the gambling, the actresses, the bevy of Miss Worlds - and the booze. "But through all those sorts of things," he says to me in his high, tight voice with its soft Northern Irish accent, "all I wanted to do was kick a ball around."
Hugh McIlvanney, the sports writer, once said that "sport at its finest is often poignant, if only because it is almost a caricature of the emphemerality of human achievements".
And the tragedy of a great footballer is how long they have to live after the talent has gone, how many careers they have to go through, how many times they have to recreate themselves.
During our interview, he continues signing books, which the wife who never saw him play passes to him, and he stops and looks me in the face only a few times. One of these times is when he's describing what it was like to fire a huge crowd. "It's just being able to do something that you find so easy in front of 60,000 or 70,000 people every week and you know that you're better than anybody else and you can do what you want. It's . . . I mean, it's just . . . total . . . adrenalin is exactly right. I used to think, this is heaven."
He's sober today, articulate for the first half hour, but very wheezy after that, his breathing coming in noisy stops and starts. That great mane of black hair is thin and grey enough now to start looking greasy and his beard, which Alex trims for him, is almost white. But his eyebrows, little surprised darts, are still black as sin and he has the same Chaucerian gap between his two front teeth. He is quite portly.
The couple live what they are keen to insist is a glamorous lifestyle. Best has his own wine label, a column in Punch and "I have my own magazine, George Best United Monthly", and does work for Sky. But the bulk of his income comes from public speaking. Alex accompanies him everywhere as his personal assistant. "The after-dinner circuit is massive, it really is," he says. "In the couple of years we've been together, work-wise we've been to New Zealand, Malaysia, Portugal, Hong Kong. All paid for. Staying in the best hotels in the world."
Do they travel first class? "That's the first thing we say," answers Best quickly. "It makes me laugh when I pick up the papers and they talk about, you know, `wasted'; it makes me laugh when I see `fallen idol', or `fallen legend'. I think these people who are writing it are sitting in an office nine to five and I don't know what they earn, but I'm going out and getting paid sometimes £5,000 for an interview! And I'm thinking, who's fallen here? And if I wanted to earn more, I could earn double!"
The Bests have had a tricky few months because of a legal row involving George's former agent, Bill McMurdo, and the Chelsea flat in which George has lived for the past 14 years. But things were settled last week, money changed hands, and they've put an offer on another flat facing Albert Bridge.
"We're under oath not to talk about it," says Alex. "I've just said we're moving," snaps George, in the one moment of tension between them.
When Alex moved into the original flat, she went round it with a decorator - "the carpet was disgusting" - and painted the walls pink. "Soft pink with a darker pink ceiling." She loves DIY and will be sad to leave the stencilling she did on the kitchen cupboards. But she's glad to have a fresh start, without the memories of the other women who have lived or slept there. She gets on well with Angie, the first Mrs Best and mother of George's son Calum (now aged 17), who was a witness in the court case.
`Angie keeps telling me what to eat and what not to eat," says George. "I said: `Angela, I'm 52. It's a bit late'."
Alex seems at ease with her womaniser husband, but when she tells me how much she loved Bridget Jones's Diary, the bit she picks out is "when she's in the flat and she knows, she just knows, he's got another woman there and she's looking in all the odd places. I really laughed at that".
When the Bests talk about their life together - sybaritic as it may be - you get the impression of two people killing time. They love crosswords: "We're hooked. We're hooked," says Alex. "We start off easy," explains George. "Alex does the quickie and I'll do the quiz words in the morning and then in the afternoon we do the cryptics and we just drive ourselves nuts. All my close friends are into quizzes."
George reads a lot of true crime, Alex reads recipe books. "Pies. Steak and kidney. Lasagne. I try things out on you, don't I, George?"
Does she even make her own pastry? "She makes everything," says her husband with an edge of pride.
He doesn't eat in the day; just white wine at lunch, but he likes a meal, preferably a Chinese, around five. They prefer to go to the same handful of restaurants (Harrod's Oyster Bar is their favourite), and the same few pubs, particularly their local, the Thene Arms in Chelsea. Alex drives. George has surrendered the wheel (he used to be addicted to white Jaguars) and has given her a black BMW. Personalised number plate: €8 ALEX. "€8 doesn't mean anything. We wanted €11 for the number on his shirt," says Alex. "But they wanted another 20 grand for it," says George.
They go to Tramp still, where they first met, and they spent his 52nd birthday at the Palm Beach casino in Berkeley Square. "You get a nice meal there," says Alex.
Best has always liked to go to places where he's known. He says it's because he gets into trouble if he strays. "We still get the idiots coming up. We get into arguments because I won't walk away from it. But I figure if someone comes up and insults me and my wife, I'm entitled to do something about it. Well, the latest one who came up wanted to know who the bimbo was . . ." He laughs through his teeth. "So she started and I'm like freaking out, so we ended up having an argument because I wouldn't back down.
"You get that once in a while, it's guys trying to be flash in front of their girlfriends or wives or pals. They never do it when they're on their own, funnily enough."
And why does he think he attracts them? "It's jealousy. Otherwise there's no reason for it."
So he really doesn't provoke it? There have, after all, been the occasional headlines since he married Alex. ("Best beat me up says wife", that sort of thing.) "I have a drink when I feel like it - as simple as that. If I don't feel like it I don't and if I've had enough I go to bed. I can't remember the last time I got seriously drunk. I've not had a hangover for years."
All this time, Best has been signing books. But he has begun to slow down; Alex is holding the next one out and he's not taking it. I asked if he thought much about the past, if he had regrets? He looked irritated. "Nah, I don't think so. I've been through things I'd rather not go through. Nobody wants to go to prison. I did. I've been in hospital twice, no three times. I've had implants to stop me drinking which were disastrous. All that stuff, I suppose."
Does he wish he came from anything other than Northern Ireland and could have played serious football internationally? "I've always believed that's the way it is. No good thinking about it. It wasn't to be so . . ." But he's still bitter that Manchester United never awarded him a testimonial. "That's one thing that really bugs me." And he still feels bad about his mother, who died an alcoholic. "It hit me really hard, because you think could you have done more? If I'd been there, could it have been different? You know, at first I wrote three, four times a week, but then you grow up and you drift away . . . You've got your own lifestyle and . . . But for a long time I felt a lot of guilt. It was like a millstone. But I realise I wouldn't have made any difference."
Did he ever talk about his own addiction with her? "Yes, but luckily she went before I had my serious problems - I think that would have been worse for her."
There is something very sad at the centre of Best. He likes to live in a present in which all is well - his father lives in Belfast, but he won't talk about the Troubles; it's as if he won't let that sort of thing touch him.
When things go wrong in his life, it's nothing to do with him: "There are a lot of crazy people out there!" And again and again, this man who many believe threw it all away before he fulfilled his true potential when he retired from top-flight football at 27, seems to want to prove to himself how much he's worth, how much he means to people.
There's the time he met Eric Clapton, who went out of his way specially; the things his manager and mentor Sir Matt Busby said about him. And there's the time he met Paul MacCartney. "I used to bump into Ringo at Tramps quite a bit," he recalls. "And once I was in there and Paul MacCartney was in having a drink with Linda. He waved and I waved back and when they were leaving, Linda came up behind me and just whispered in my ear: `We love you'. She just whispered it. It was all she said. We love you. It just freaked me out, it really did."
For a moment, he looks as though he is about to cry. But then he seems to notice his wife, 26 and beautiful, beside him. She hands him a book. He gets back to business. "Are you sure these are all `Best Wishes'?" he asks.
Bestie: A Portrait Of A Legend by Joe Lovejoy, is published by Macmillan, price £16.99 in the UK