The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

Air

The Rising Sun

June 1987

Last week I was obliged to visit the Strand, in central London, to complete the final paperwork for my departure to Australia; and now, in a few days’ time, I shall be leaving this country at last – perhaps never to return. In the meantime, my trip to London has stirred up some very potent memories, which I feel compelled to set down on paper before I leave.

It did not take as long as I’d expected to complete the formalities at Australia House. After which, finding myself with most of an afternoon to spare, I decided to take a walk into the City. For old times’ sake, if nothing else. I had brought my camera with me – my trusted Kodak Retina Reflex IV, bought in the 1960s, which has never taken a bad picture yet – and wanted to make a permanent record of those places which had once been so familiar to me – if any trace of them still remained.

As I made my way in blazing sunshine down Fleet Street, up Ludgate Hill, through the long shadow cast by St Paul’s Cathedral and along Cheapside until I could glimpse the massive portico of the Bank of England itself, I realized that it was almost thirty years since I had last walked these streets. Twenty-seven years, to be precise. Everything had changed, in the meantime. Everything. The old City of London, which had been the centre of my universe for a few intense, troubling months towards the fag-end of the 1950s, had witnessed a revolution which even in those far-off days had been considered long overdue. A revolution in architecture, in fashion and now, finally – or so one read in the newspapers – in working practices. All the fine, arrogant old buildings were still there – the Guildhall and the Mansion House, the Royal Exchange and St Mary-le-Bow – but wedged in amongst them were dozens of new tower blocks, some dating from the benighted 1960s, others only a couple of years old, vaulting, sleek and glittery, like the decade we were now enjoying. The men (there were still not very many women) all wore suits, but these suits seemed sharper and more aggressive than I remembered, and there was not a single bowler hat to be seen. As for the working practices … Well, nearly all of the trading was done on screens now, if reports were to be believed. The face-to-face meetings, the chummy handshakes on the Stock Exchange floor, were consigned to the past. No more deals adumbrated over port and cigars at the Gresham Club; no more business gossip swapped in well-bred undertones at the George and Vulture. Traders apparently took lunch at their desks these days – cellophane-wrapped sandwiches brought in at silly prices by outside caterers – never lifting their glazed eyes from the screens where figures flickered their ceaseless announcements of profit and loss, from early morning to late at night. What role could I have possibly have played, as an ignorant twenty-one-year-old, in this frantic and impatient new world?

Yes, I had been only twenty-one when I first came to London. Some time in the last few weeks of 1958, it was. I had not been to university, and for two years had tucked myself away in the tedious anonymity of a filing clerk’s job in Lichfield, but some dormant mutinous impulse – my youthful horror, I suppose, at the thought of being stifled in this way for ever – had finally propelled me away from the safety of my home town and my parents’ house and sent me to London – to seek my fortune, as the cliché would have it. Or, if not my fortune, something even more elusive and intangible – my vocation, my destiny. For I had, without telling my family (nor would I have told my friends, if I had any), started writing. Writing! Such presumption would not have been tolerated, if my parents had known about it. My father would have mocked me mercilessly – especially when he discovered that my instincts inclined me towards poetry: and not just poetry, but, worse still, ‘modern’ poetry – that apparently formless, apparently meaningless cultural aberration that was hated above all other things by the middle-brow lower classes. Lichfield, the birthplace of Samuel Johnson, was certainly no place for an aspiring poet in the 1950s; whereas, if rumours were to be believed, London was awash with poets. I envisaged long, wine-fuelled conversations with fellow-poets in the bedsitting rooms of South London suburbs; heady evenings spent in Soho pubs listening to poetry readings in an atmosphere thick with Bohemianism and cigarette smoke. I imagined a life for myself in which I could make the momentous declaration ‘I am a poet’ without attracting incredulity or ridicule.

I have a long story to set down, so I must move it forward. Easily enough, I found a room in a shared house near Highgate Cemetery, and – through the classified advertisements in the London Evening News – a temporary job as messenger boy for the stockbroking firm of Walter, Davis & Warren. Their offices were in Telegraph Street, and a large part of my job involved carrying mail by hand to and from the central clearing point for Stock Exchange Member firms in Blossoms Inn: a system which allowed for all settlement transfers and cheques to be delivered within the same day. (Such a thing would not be necessary now, of course, with faxes and electronic transfers.) I was allowed one hour for lunch, between 1 and 2 p.m., and most days I would take it at Hill’s, an old-fashioned City restaurant near Liverpool Street Station, where – if you didn’t mind the green-tiled walls that made it look somewhat like a public lavatory – you could dine on steak and kidney pudding, mashed potatoes and apple crumble for something in the region of half a crown.

Dining alone is a problematic activity. I had no friends in the City, or indeed anywhere in London, and no one to talk to over lunch. Most days, therefore, I would take a book with me – usually a slim volume of contemporary verse, more than likely borrowed from the library in Highgate. The restaurant would be crowded, and at a table for six you might find yourself sharing with five strangers. One day, early in January 1959, I looked up from my book – it was Eliot’s Four Quartets – and found a bearded man of about my own age staring at me intently. His fork was poised over a plate of liver and onions but instead of eating, he fixed his eyes on me and declaimed, in a loud and perfectly modulated voice:Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past.If all time is eternally presentAll time is unredeemable.

The other diners at our table looked across at both of us in some puzzlement. One of them may even have tutted. To speak to a stranger, in such a loud voice, in a public place, and to make use of such peculiar phraseology, was no doubt considered a grave breach of City protocol. For my own part, I was dumbstruck.

‘Tell me, do you consider Mr Eliot to be a genius,’ my new acquaintance continued, in an insolent tone, ‘or a fraud and a humbug of the first water?’

‘I … I don’t know,’ I stumbled. ‘Or at least … Well –’ (more boldly, now) ‘– that is to say, in my view – for what my view is worth – I consider him … the greatest living poet. In the English language, that is.’

‘Good. I’m pleased to find myself sitting opposite a man of taste and refinement.’

The man held out his hand, and I shook it. Then he introduced himself: his name was Roger Anstruther. We talked a little more about Eliot, then – touching also, I seem to remember, upon the work of Auden and Frost – but what I remember best about that first conversation was not its substance, but the strange sort of electric thrill which went through me in the presence of this singular and overbearing man. His hair had a slightly reddish tint, his beard was thick but closely trimmed, and although the sobriety of his suit marked him out unmistakeably as a working denizen of the Square Mile, a yellow handkerchief with pale-blue polka dots protruded from his top pocket in a manner that suggested some idiosyncratic sense of personal style – if not actual foppishness.

Abruptly at a quarter to two he rose to his feet and looked at his watch.

‘Well then,’ he said. ‘They are playing Fauré at the Wigmore Hall tonight. The E minor quartet among other works. I have booked two tickets for the front row, where I intend to lose myself in delicious mists of French introspection. Here is the other ticket. We shall meet at The Cock and Lion a few doors along the street, at seven o’clock. If you get there first, mine will be a large gin and tonic, with ice. Goodbye.’

He shook my hand again, draped a long, black cashmere overcoat upon his shoulders, and was gone with a flourish. I gazed after him in shocked silence. But when the shock had receded, my predominant emotion was a throbbing, delirious happiness.

Roger Anstruther was, it goes without saying, completely unlike any other man I had ever met in my short, circumscribed life.

Music was his passion and, although he did not perform, his knowledge of the classical repertoire, from the baroque period to the present day, was flawless and comprehensive. But he could also discourse, with absolute authority, on any other branch of the arts. Architecture, painting, drama, the novel – there seemed to be nothing he hadn’t read, seen, heard and thought about. And yet he was only one year older than me. How had he acquired so much knowledge, and experience – and confidence, of course – in such a short span of time? The discrepancies between us (magnified as they were by Roger’s grandiloquent, teacherly, sometimes arrogant, sometimes downright bullying manner) could only make me feel more insular, provincial and poorly educated than I had felt before.

So, at any rate, began what I consider to have been my real education. From now on, Roger and I would go out together almost every night. Orchestral concerts at the Royal Festival Hall; experimental theatre in Soho and Bloomsbury; the National Gallery; Kenwood House; poetry readings in windowless basements or the upstairs rooms of shabby Hampstead pubs. And when we could find nothing of that sort to interest us, we would simply walk – walk through the mazy, empty backstreets of London, long into the night, while he pointed out strange architectural features, quirky buildings, forgotten landmarks with some recondite fragment of London history attached to them. Once again, his knowledge seemed inexhaustible. He was enthusiastic, opinionated, fascinating, indefatigable and infuriating, in equal measure. He could be frivolous and loveable; he could also be impatient and cruel. He dominated me completely. It was a relationship which (at first) suited both of our needs perfectly.

Many of our evenings together started directly after work, in a pub called The Rising Sun in Cloth Fair, close to Smithfield Market. I would usually get there first, shortly after five o’clock, and buy Roger his gin and tonic while waiting for him to arrive. I had discovered that he worked on the Stock Exchange floor, but not in as exalted a capacity as I might have imagined. He was what used to be known as a ‘Blue Button’ – someone at the very lowest level of the trading hierarchy. Essentially he was, like me, an errand boy, although he was certainly closer to the centre of things than I would ever be. The men who actually traded in shares on the Exchange floor were known as jobbers: they were not allowed to deal directly with members of the public, so they took their orders from the brokers, many of whom had little offices (or ‘boxes’) on the periphery of the floor. The Blue Buttons were intermediaries between the brokers and the jobbers: they carried messages, relayed instructions, and were generally required, during trading hours, to do whatever their jobber instructed them to do, however trivial or eccentric. I couldn’t help thinking that for someone of Roger’s praeternatural intelligence (as I thought of it) and lofty ambition, this job was rather on the demeaning side.

‘Well, I won’t be at it for long,’ he told me one evening, as we sat over our drinks in The Rising Sun, a fug building up inside while flurries of snow continued to swirl along Cloth Fair in the January wind. ‘My disillusionment with the world of high finance is more or less complete.’

These were grand words, you might think, for a man of twenty-two. But this was the tone in which Roger always expressed himself.

‘I always knew that the Stock Market would be a frightful place,’ he continued. ‘But I’d also noticed that the people who worked there – while they invariably seemed to be dreadful bores – never gave the impression of being short of money. Of course, for a lot of them, it’s all inherited from Mummy and Daddy. Most of the brokers have been to Eton – and half the jobbers as well – and we all know that kind of education doesn’t come cheap. But still, they’re making a show of opening the place up to grammar school boys like me, and I reckoned that if I at least got a sense of how large amounts of cash tend to be traded back and forth, then surely some of it would come my way eventually. But I think I was being naive. And besides, I don’t have the temperament for it. I don’t love money enough to want to spend my whole life thinking about it. That’s where I differ from Crispin, you see.’

Crispin Lambert was, I knew, the name of the jobber for whom (or with whom, as Roger preferred to phrase it) he had been assigned to work.

‘How do you get on with him?’ I asked.

‘Oh, well enough,’ he said. ‘He’s decent, I suppose, by the wretched standards of this place. But he’s just a typical product of the system, really. Charm personified, on the surface. If you ever meet him, you’ll think he’s the friendliest fellow you’ve ever set eyes upon. But that’s just a mask for his fundamental ruthlessness. He loves money more than anything else, and he wants money, and he’ll use any means at his disposal to get it. That’s what I mean when I say these people are all such bores. For me, money is a means to an end. I’d use it to travel. To see the world in style. I’d like to be able to afford good seats at the opera. I’d like to be able to own a Picasso or two. But for Crispin and his ilk, money is the end. Their aspirations stop there. Well, I’m sorry, but to me that’s just a tedious view of the world. Shallow. Superficial. Nothing to it. I mean, what actually goes on inside the heads of people like that? Where’s their inner life?’

‘Doesn’t he have, you know … pastimes? Hobbies, recreations?’

‘He’s a fiend for the horses,’ Roger admitted. ‘Studies the form assiduously. Knows the name of every trainer at every stable in the country. But I’m not sure it gives him any pleasure. He simply bets to win. It’s all about the money again, you see.’

As it happened, I did meet Crispin Lambert a few weeks later: by which time, various subtle but disquieting shifts had taken place in my relationship with Roger. For one thing, I’d had my first experience of his facility – one might almost call it a relish – for creating embarrassing situations. We had attended a production of Titus Andronicus where the entire play was performed in modern dress and set in the offices of a local council building in Stockton-on-Tees. This innovation had been greeted with some approval from the newspaper reviewers, but Roger was noticeably unimpressed. Twenty minutes into the performance he stood up, and declared at the top of his voice: ‘I see that we are being bamboozled, ladies and gentlemen, by talentless oafs. These cretins are dragging our greatest playwright through the mire, and I will not stand for it a moment longer. Anyone who wishes to join me in making a swift exodus to the nearest pub is more than welcome. Come, Harold.’ On this occasion he was wearing – as was often his way – a black, silk-lined cape, which he swirled around himself in the most effective and compelling gesture before stumbling out over the legs of the other audience members in his row, dragging me after him while everyone (including the actors) looked on in outraged astonishment. To me, prone as I was to an attitude of deference and self-effacement whatever the circumstances, this was a frankly mortifying experience. My cheeks flamed under the knowledge that hundreds of pairs of eyes were fixed upon us, whereas Roger, I am sure, savoured the moment. He liked nothing more than to be the centre of attention. Afterwards, as we were sitting in the pub, he laughed heartily. ‘Someone had to show those idiots up for what they were,’ he said. ‘Everyone else would just have sat there like a flock of hypnotized sheep.’ Then, observing that I was upset and embarrassed by the whole episode, he began to chide me for my timidity. ‘Harold, you lack spirit,’ he said. ‘You are too cowed by inhibitions, which make you afraid not only to speak your own mind, but even to look inside and find out what’s really in it. Your sort will do anything to preserve the status quo. I’m afraid you will never amount to anything, with that sort of attitude.’

This sentiment was to be expressed several times during our friendship. It next happened after I had made the mistake of showing Roger some of my own poetry, an act of presumption on my part which led to a most painful evening together – the first evening I ever spent with Roger when for a while I really believed that I hated him, and wished him dead. As usual, we were in The Rising Sun, where we had been sitting for more than an hour and a half, while he lectured me on ancient British pagan rituals (the latest field to have attracted his fickle, quicksilver interest) without alluding once to the precious manuscript which I had put into his hands two days earlier in an anonymous A4 manila envelope. Finally, during a brief interlude in his monologue, my patience deserted me, and my curiosity would wait no longer.

‘Have you read them?’ I blurted out.

He hesitated, and swirled the gin around in his glass.

‘Oh yes,’ he said at last. ‘Oh yes, I’ve read them all right.’

The subsequent pause seemed to go on for ever.

‘Well? What did you think?’

‘I thought … I thought it probably best if I didn’t say anything, on the whole.’

‘I see,’ I said – not seeing at all, but feeling very wounded, all the same. ‘Didn’t you have any criticisms to make?’

‘Oh, Harold, what would be the point?’ Roger sighed heavily. ‘You have no poetry in you, that’s the problem. No poetry in your soul. The soul of a poet is a floating, airy thing. You are earthbound. Of the earth.’

He regarded me almost kindly as he said this, and clasped me by the hand. It was an extraordinary moment: our first instance of real physical contact, I believe (after seeing each other for so many weeks!), which sent a pulse of exhilaration through my body, so that I could almost feel the blood tingling through it, as if a circuit had been completed at last. And yet, at the same time, I felt an absolute revulsion: my fury at his rejection, at the sheer contempt in which he clearly held my attempts at verse was so strong that I could not speak, and withdrew my hand sharply after only a second or two had gone by.

‘I’ll get some more drinks,’ he said, rising to his feet. And I was sure I could glimpse an almost daemonic smile in his eye as he looked back over his shoulder at me and carelessly asked: ‘Same again?’

I was in thrall to Roger. However cruel he was to me, I could not escape him. I had made very few other friends in London, and besides, his personality was so much stronger than mine, I accepted even his severest criticisms of me and believed them to be well founded. We continued with our schemes of pleasure and self-improvement. But he did not take me by the hand again, for quite a while.

A recurrent feature of our conversations was our plan to take a long trip together, at some unspecified time, through France and Germany and thence down to Italy, to visit Florence, Rome and Naples, and to view the splendours of the ancient world. Like all of Roger’s schemes, it was grandiose. He would not contemplate a quick journey there and back by rail. There were many places he wanted to see on the way down; and he even began to talk about returning along the Italian and French rivieras, with a possible detour to Spain. The whole excursion, he said, if carried out properly, would take a number of months, and would cost several hundred pounds. And so the main obstacle standing in the way of this scheme was entirely predictable, and seemingly intractable: a serious lack of funds.

The germ of a solution presented itself, however, early one evening in March as we were making our way towards the bar of the Mermaid Theatre, where we were intending to have a drink and perhaps see the performance afterwards. As we strolled together down Carter Lane, we passed a tall City gent in his pin-striped suit and bowler hat walking in the other direction. Roger stopped in his tracks and looked after him as he ambled by.

‘That’s Crispin,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s go and have a word. I’ll introduce you to him.’

‘Will he be pleased to see us?’ I asked, somewhat nervously.

‘Horrified, I should think. That’ll be half the fun.’

Crispin had disappeared through the door of a pub which also, I noticed, went by the name of The Rising Sun, despite being less than a mile from our regular haunt in Cloth Fair. We found him standing at the bar, bent in deep thought over the pages of the Sporting Life.

‘Good evening, Mr Lambert,’ said Roger, in a deferential tone I had never heard him use before.

‘Roger!’ He looked up, thoroughly startled. ‘Good gracious. I didn’t know that this was one of your watering holes.’

‘One of many, Mr Lambert, one of many. Allow me to introduce my friend, Harold Sim.’

‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ he said, extending a lukewarm handshake. He hesitated, waiting for us to move away. But we stayed where we were. ‘Well …’ he said, after an awkward silence, ‘I suppose you gentlemen will be wanting a drink?’

Once we’d had a few drinks together, Crispin Lambert turned out to be amiable enough: not that I took a very active role in the conversation. He and Roger soon fell to discussing their work on the Stock Exchange floor, and I found myself lost in a thicket of financial jargon of which I had not the least understanding. My mind drifted off and I began thinking of other things. Some lines of a sonnet occurred to me and I began writing them down in my notebook. I took no further notice of my companions, in fact, until several minutes later, when I realized that Roger was addressing me directly.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that sounds an interesting proposition. What do you say, Harold – shall we pool our resources and give it a try?’

I knew that they had been discussing, among other things, the prospects of a particular horse running in the 3.30 at Newmarket that Saturday, so I assumed at first that Roger was suggesting a bet. But it turned out that it was rather more complicated than that.

‘Mr Lambert has already placed his bet,’ he explained, holding up a crumpled piece of paper with a bookmaker’s scrawl upon it. ‘This is the betting slip, and what he is proposing, is that he sells us the right to buy it from him in the future. What he wants to sell us, in effect, is an option on the bet.’

‘An option?’

‘Yes. You see, he’s really being very decent about it. He’s placed five pounds on a horse called Red Runner to win, at odds of 6-1. Now you and I can’t afford that kind of stake, obviously. But what he’s suggesting is that, if we pay him one pound now, that gives us the right to buy the betting slip from him for twenty pounds – after the race has been run.’

‘Twenty pounds? But we don’t have twenty pounds.’

‘Well, we’ll just have to borrow it. You see, at that point, we can’t lose. We only have to buy the slip off him if the horse has won – by which time, it will be worth thirty pounds. So even if we buy it for twenty, plus the original pound we’ve paid for the option, then we’ve made nine pounds profit. And the only thing we’re risking is our original one pound.’

‘I still don’t get it. Why don’t we just place a bet ourselves?’

‘Because this way we stand to make more money. If we just bet one pound at 6-1, we’d only make five pounds profit. This way we make almost twice as much.’

‘It’s what we call leverage,’ Mr Lambert explained.

My head was still swimming. ‘But surely this means you will be out of pocket yourself?’

Mr Lambert smiled. ‘You leave me to worry about that.’

‘Believe me,’ said Roger, ‘he wouldn’t be doing it if he stood to lose any money on the deal. I’m sure he’s thought it through.’

‘Precisely,’ said Crispin. ‘The fact is that I already have another each-way bet on this race, with a different bookmaker. So really, you understand, I have nothing to lose by this arrangement, and might even gain by it. In fact, everybody gains by it.’

‘So come on, Harold – what do you say? We stand to make ninepounds. That would make a good start to our European fund.’

‘True.’

‘Well then, stump up the money, there’s a good chap.’

I wasn’t too happy about being the sole contributor – this had not, as I understood it, been part of the arrangement, but it seemed that Roger only had five shillings with him at the time. I handed Mr Lambert a crisp green one pound note – not by any means an inconsiderable sum, for me, in those days. In return, he scribbled some words on a sheet of paper torn from his pocket book, signed the document, and passed it over to my friend.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Now it’s all strictly legal. Let’s settle up on Monday morning, and hope for a satisfactory outcome all round.’

With that he drained his glass and took his leave, waving a cheery goodbye from the door of the pub as he did so.

Roger smiled and clapped me on the back. ‘Well, today was our lucky day,’ he said. ‘Another round?’

‘I’m not sure about this,’ I said, frowning into the remains of my beer. ‘There has to be a catch. And anyway, nine pounds isn’t going to get us to Naples and back.’

‘True,’ said Roger, ‘very true. But we’ve made a good start. And besides, I’ve thought of something else. I’ll go up and see my sister at the weekend.’

‘How will that help?’ I asked.

‘She’s filthy rich, that’s how. Married the boss of a big chemical engineering firm a couple of years ago. I shall pop up there on Saturday afternoon, play the part of the devoted younger brother to the hilt, stay the night, and ask her for a little loan in the morning.’

‘A loan?’

‘Or an advance – that’s how I shall put it. An advance on the fabulous book I shall write about the archaeological sites of Northern and Southern Europe. I shall invite her to invest in the brilliance of her brother. How does that sound? These people like to talk of investments.’

Roger’s enthusiasm was infectious sometimes, there was no denying that. ‘It sounds just fine,’ I said, and by way of celebration he stood me a whisky chaser with my next pint of beer.

When I saw Roger at Hill’s Restaurant on Monday lunchtime, he brought good news and bad. Red Runner had come in first, which meant that we could exercise our option on Crispin’s betting slip, and collect the winnings – thirty pounds on his five-pound stake, less the twenty pounds we owed him, and the one pound for the option: all of which left us nine pounds in profit. Very satisfactory. Less satisfactory, on the other hand, was the outcome of Roger’s approaches to his sister.

‘Let this be a warning to you, Harold,’ he said gravely, ‘that women are not to be trusted, or relied upon. In fact, one should not even take the slightest notice of the selfish, small-minded creatures. Harriet showed not the least interest in our expedition, or in the book which I told her might come out of it. Her horizons are simply too … limited to take in the importance of what we’re proposing to do. She focuses entirely on her own tiny, trivial, domestic concerns.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, this baby she is going to have, of course. It was all she could talk about.’

‘Ah. Well, I can see how that might seem –’

‘She’s always been like this, you know, Harriet. I’d forgotten what she was like. I’d forgotten how much I hated her.’

‘When is the baby due?’ I asked, rather shocked by his language.

‘Oh, in a few months. I wasn’t going to flatter her sense of self-importance by asking her questions like that. Come on, let’s get some fresh air.’

We left the tiled gloom of the restaurant behind us and spent the rest of our lunch hour in the pleasant green space of Finsbury Circus, a short walk away. It was now early in March, and just about warm enough to sit outside reading a book in the weak sunshine. I had with me a copy of The Hawk in the Rain, the first collection of Ted Hughes, then a little-known poet. Roger was reading his well-thumbed edition of Witchcraft Today, by Gerald Gardner. This sensational volume had been published about five years earlier, and had attracted considerable attention, especially in the popular Sunday newspapers which liked to titillate their readers with the notion that modern witches’ covens existed the length and breadth of suburban England, where sex orgies and acts of naked devil-worship regularly took place behind respectable closed doors. Roger dismissed these reports as lurid fantasies and insisted, on the contrary, that Mr Gardner’s book was one of the most important publications of recent times: he maintained that it had uncovered a vital, authentic spiritual heritage which stretched far back into the pre-Roman era, and provided a valuable counter-tradition to the repressive authoritarianism of the Christian Church. Mr Gardner’s name for this alternative religion was ‘Wicca’, and its main characteristic was that it involved the worship of two Gods, or rather a God and a Goddess, represented respectively by the Sun and the Moon. Not being much inclined towards religious belief of any sort, I tended not to listen too closely when Roger was expounding on this theme, although I do remember what he said to me that afternoon in Finsbury Circus. ‘You should pay attention to this, Harold, if you’re serious about wanting to write. The Goddess is where all poetic inspiration comes from. Read Robert Graves if you don’t believe me. You’d better keep on the right side of her. Unfortunately …’ (he put the book down and lay back on the grass, his head resting on folded hands) ‘she absolutely disapproves of homosexuality, and has terrible punishments in store for those who practise it. Bad news for the likes of us.’

I said nothing, but a shiver of protest went through me when I heard this remark, which was thrown out casually, as if merely the statement of an obvious truth. I knew that Roger sometimes took pleasure in being foolishly provocative. It was also that afternoon, I remember, that he first mentioned his intention to place a malediction on his sister.

Meanwhile, Roger did not neglect the more material side of our affairs. Over the next few weeks, he came to a series of further financial arrangements with Crispin Lambert and his numerous bookmakers, each one more ambitious and more elaborate than the last. I heard talk of each-way bets, four-folds and accumulators. Then we were on to any-to-come bets, fivespots, pontoons and sequential multiples. Each one of these bets was recorded on a betting slip: Crispin would calculate what this slip might be worth if the race had the desired outcome, and would then sell us an option to buy the slip off him when the result was announced. Somehow – I presumed because Roger and Crispin were accurate in their calculations, and in their study of the horses’ form – we seemed to make a profit every time, and everybody came out of it a winner. Soon we became bolder, and the agreements we signed no longer gave us the option of purchasing Crispin’s betting slips when the race was over, but imposed on us the obligation to do so. We chose to do this because the terms he offered us were more favourable, even though the risk involved (on our side) was much greater. Steadily, however, our travelling fund grew larger and larger. Roger became increasingly excited about the prospect of giving up our jobs and embarking on this voyage, until he could barely talk about anything else: it became his absolute obsession. The cultural pleasures on offer in London seemed to have palled, as far as he was concerned, and we rarely went to concerts or the theatre together any more. Instead, if we were not poring over maps of Pompeii and drawings of ancient German burial mounds, he preferred to stay indoors and study his growing library of volumes on witchcraft and paganism. And somehow, subtly, indefinably, although our trip was still talked about very much as a shared endeavour, I felt the closeness between us beginning to slip away, was more and more conscious that I had somehow disappointed him, failed to meet his expectations, and this realization upset me deeply.

Then, one day in the middle of the week, he came to me with a proposal which caused me some alarm.

‘I was with Crispin most of last night,’ he said, ‘in The Rising Sun. He really is a very decent fellow, I think. He really wants to help us raise the money for this trip. Anyway, last night, we worked out a way we could do it – all in one fell swoop. By Saturday evening, the money could be ours. We could hand in our notice next week and be on the train to Dover within a fortnight. What do you say?’

Naturally, I said that it all sounded wonderful. But I was less enthusiastic when he told me what he had in mind.

The proposal, in fact, was for one single, gigantic bet – or rather, a phenomenally complex spread of bets – to be placed with five bookmakers on Saturday’s races. I cannot remember the details now (not surprisingly, since I could never really understand them then), but among the different terms being floated were ‘single stakes about’, ‘round robin’, ‘vice versa’, ‘the flag’, and ‘full-cover multiples’. As before, it was Crispin who had chosen the horses, calculated the odds, placed the bets, and had bundled the whole package up into one financial instrument – the usual signed piece of paper, taken from his pocket book – which he was now offering to sell to us for …

‘… for how much?’ I said to Roger, incredulous.

‘I know it sounds a lot – but the winnings will be five times that, Harold. Five times!’

‘But that’s the whole of our fund. Everything we’ve saved up so far. All the sacrifices we’ve made to put that money together … Supposing we lose it all?’

‘We can’t lose it all. That’s the beauty of it. If we were just to place that money in a single bet, like most punters would do, then of course we’d be taking a huge risk. But the system Crispin and I have worked out is much cleverer than that. It’s flawless – look.’ He handed me a sheet of foolscap paper, on which were written a series of calculations and mathematical formulae far too complicated for me (or any other averagely intelligent being) to comprehend.

‘But if this system worked,’ I objected, ‘everyone would be doing it.’

‘If they had the brains to work it out, yes.’

‘What are you saying? That you’ve found a way of making money out of nothing? Out of air?’

Roger smiled a proud, secretive smile as he took the paper back. ‘I’ve told you this before,’ he said. ‘You, Harold, are earthbound. You need to develop a more spiritual outlook. Don’t become one of those lesser mortals who inhabits the material world. The world where people spend their lives making things and then buying and selling and using and consuming them. The world of objects. That’s for the hoi polloi, not the likes of you and me. We’re above all that. We’re alchemists.’

It was when Roger began to talk like this, I’m ashamed to say, that I found him most irresistible – even when I knew that I was being controlled and manipulated. It was with a sinking heart, all the same, that I agreed to hand over all of our savings (and rather more) to Crispin in return for his promise that he would sell us, in a few days’ time, the betting slips which both he and Roger assured me would be worth a fortune by then. A sinking heart, and a hollow, nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach.

‘Will you telephone me on Saturday?’ I asked. ‘To let me know the outcome – not that it’s in any doubt, of course.’

‘Telephone you? Why on earth would I do that? You’ll be with me, surely.’

‘I was planning to visit my parents,’ I explained. ‘It is the Easter weekend, after all.’

‘Oh, don’t talk such nonsense,’ he said, with an impatient wave of his hand. ‘Haven’t you learned anything from me in the last few months? Must you always run for cover to the safety of those silly bourgeois, Christian values that your family drummed into you from an early age? These Christian festivals are just a sham – a pale shadow of the real thing. You’re coming with me this weekend to discover what Easter is really about.’

‘Coming with you? Where?’

‘To Stonehenge, of course. We’ll drive down late on Saturday night. We have to be there before dawn – that’s when the ceremony will begin.’

He went on to explain, carefully, as if to an imbecile child, that the Christian story of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ was in fact nothing more than a corruption of much older and more powerful myths concerning the rising of the sun following the vernal equinox. Even the word Easter and its German equivalent, Ostern, came from a common origin – Eostur or Ostar – which to the Norsemen meant the season of the rising sun, the season of new life. And so, at dawn on Sunday, hundreds of pagan worshippers would gather within the great circle of stones outside Salisbury to pay their homage to the Sun God.

‘And you and I, my dear Harold, will most certainly be among them. Come to my place on Saturday evening – we’ll have a little supper – and then some friends will pick us up in their car at about two. We should be there in plenty of time.’

‘Friends?’ I asked. ‘What friends?’

‘Oh, just some people I know,’ he said, enigmatically. Roger liked to keep the different areas of his life strictly compartmentalized, and if he was about to introduce me to some of his fellow pagans, I knew that I was expected to regard this as a special privilege.

‘Remember,’ he said, just before we parted, ‘the Sun God is the masculine God. That’s what we will be going there to worship – the spirit of Manhood, the essence of Maleness. I shall,’ he added (with a challenging gleam in his eye), ‘take it very amiss if you choose not to come.’

I told him that I would think about it, and left in a state of genuine indecision.

Writing all of this down, at almost thirty years’ distance, it seems incredible to me now that I should have been so in thrall to Roger Anstruther and his arrogant, domineering personality. But remember – whoever you are, reading these pages – that I was callow, I was unsure of myself, I was a young man alone in a big, frightening city, and in Roger I felt that I had met someone who – how shall I put this? – who confirmed something about myself. Something I had always suspected – always known, even, in the very remotest depths of my being – but which I had been too frightened (too cowardly, he would say) to acknowledge. I was still, at that tender age, hungry to unravel the mysteries of life. At first I had thought that the answers lay in poetry, but now Roger was beginning to open up a different, even more alluring world to me – a world of shadows, portents, symbols, riddles and coincidences. Was it coincidence, for example, that all our schemes seemed to be coming to fruition on the eve of the festival of the Rising Sun, when this was the very name of the pub where we’d had all our earliest and most significant conversations? Questions like this nagged at my youthful, impressionable mind and made me feel that perhaps I was now on the verge of some revelation, some momentous breakthrough which would resolve all difficulties and set me free from the bonds which I felt had been restraining me all my life.

It was for these reasons – reasons which might seem feeble and even frivolous to an unsympathetic reader (forgive me, Max, if that is you!) – that I chose not to return to my parents’ home that weekend; but on Saturday evening, instead, I set out on the long walk which led from my shared house in Highgate to Roger’s rented bedsitting room in a decrepit Notting Hill terrace.

When I arrived, he was sitting at his desk. I could see at once that something was wrong. His face was deathly pale, and his hands were trembling as he sat hunched over pages and pages of densely scribbled figures, to which he was adding further calculations in pencil, in a state of such ferocious concentration that he barely looked up to register my arrival.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘Don’t interrupt,’ he answered curtly, and began whispering some more numbers under his breath, while scrawling ever more frantically on the paper.

‘Roger, you look dreadful,’ I persisted. ‘Is it … ?’ Of course, I knew what it was. I felt suddenly faint, and sat down heavily on his bed in the corner of the room. ‘Don’t tell me it’s the wager. Did it go wrong?’

‘Completely wrong,’ he said, in a trembling voice, crumpling up one of the sheets of paper, tossing it aside, and starting on a new one. ‘Utterly wrong.’

‘Well … What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘Mean? What does it mean?’ He glared at me in fury. ‘It means that we’ve lost everything. It means that on Monday morning I have to give Crispin the lot.’

‘But – But you told me that wasn’t possible.’

‘It wasn’t possible. Or at least, it shouldn’t have been possible.’

‘How did it happen? Didn’t the right horses win?’

‘Almost, yes. But then one of the races ended in a dead heat. That threw the whole thing out. We hadn’t allowed for it.’

‘I thought you’d allowed for everything.’

‘Will you just be quiet for a minute, Harold?’ He seized the sheet of paper and waved it at me, by way of demonstration. ‘Can’t you see what I’m trying to do? I’m trying to make sense of it all.’

He seemed, however, more or less to have given up on this attempt: instead of making any more calculations, he simply sat there, sucking on his pencil and looking at the pages of arithmetic with sightless, unfocused eyes.

‘But, Roger,’ I began, gently, ‘Crispin is your friend, after all. He won’t hold us to this, will he?’

At these words, after a short pause in which to digest them, Roger leaped up and began to pace the room.

‘Are you a halfwit?’ he barked, after a minute or two. ‘Don’t you understand anything? We signed a piece of paper. The City has a code of conduct for this sort of thing. Dictum meum pactum – “My word is my bond”. He’s going to take everything he can off us, you fool! Down to the last farthing. He’s in this up to his neck as well, you know. He will have lost a fortune today. An absolute bloody fortune. So he’s not going to let us wriggle out of this one.’

There was a longer silence, during which I took in the enormity of what he was telling me, and its possible consequences: all our plans come to nothing, and ahead of me the prospect of weeks, or months, not merely of poverty but debt – for Roger had persuaded me to commit to this ludicrous wager even more money than I actually had to my credit in a bank account. And when my mind began to dwell on that fact, I started to feel towards him something which, until now, I had never allowed myself to feel: indignation – pure, boiling, seething indignation.

‘No, you’re the halfwit,’ I said to him – in a measured tone, at first: but when he looked across at me in disbelief, my voice started to rise. ‘You idiot, Roger! How could you have done this? More to the point, how can I have been so trusting? Why did I listen to you? Why have I let you treat me this way for months, doing everything at your behest, running around at your beck and call as if I were your mistress? I was so impressed by you, so in awe of you, and now … now this! You didn’t know what you were doing. You didn’t even know what you were talking about. You’re a fraud, that’s what you are. What our American cousins would call a phoney. And here I’ve been, hanging on your every word, believing everything you tell me – giving away half of my favourite books because you despise the authors, throwing away most of my own poems because you treated them with such … cold, calculated disdain. And yet you’re a fraud, pure and simple! To think that I listened to you, to think that I took you seriously! When you weren’t making a spectacle of us both in the theatre, you were trying to tell me that the Christian faith was bunkum and we should all be sacrificing goats in the middle of a stone circle instead – you even told me that you were going to put a curse on your sister, for pity’s sake! Well, who do you think you are, exactly? A guru, a magician? A cross between Leavis, Midas and Gandalf? I’m afraid it won’t wash any more, Roger – it just won’t wash. You’ve dazzled me for long enough. The truth is that I can see through you now. My eyes have been opened. I suppose I should be grateful for that, at least – although it’s been a heavy price to pay, a very heavy price. Well, one lives and learns.’

I picked up my coat from the bed and started putting it on again, intending to leave; but I was halted by some words of Roger’s, spoken in a low, insistent, chilling monotone.

‘I did put a curse on my sister,’ he said.

I paused, with my arm halfway into a sleeve.

‘Pardon?’

By way of reply, Roger walked over to the mantelpiece, and picked up a letter. It was written on two sheets of blue notepaper, folded in half. He handed it to me, and stood over me while I was reading it.

It was from his mother. I cannot remember much of what it said, but I do remember the thrust, which was to let Roger know that his sister was distraught, after losing her baby in a miscarriage a few days earlier.

‘So?’ I said, handing back the letter, and finishing the business of putting my coat on.

‘I did that,’ he said.

I looked at him for a moment, to see if he was being serious. Apparently, he was. ‘Don’t be ludicrous,’ I said, and made for the door.

Roger grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me back.

‘It’s true, I tell you. That was what I asked her for.’

‘Asked her? Asked who?’

‘The Goddess.’

I was in no mood to hear this. Whether what he said was true or not (or whether he believed it or not – which perhaps was more to the point), I wanted to leave.

‘Enjoy your festival tomorrow morning,’ I said. ‘I’m going home.’

I tried to shake myself free from his grip, but it became tighter. I looked into his eyes and was amazed to see that there were tears welling up in them.

‘Don’t go, Harold,’ he said. ‘Please don’t go.’

Before I really knew what was happening, he had drawn me closer to him, and was kissing me on the mouth. I tried to pull away but his embrace was stronger than I would have thought possible.

‘So much,’ he was whispering, as the bristles of his beard brushed coarsely against my lips, ‘so much we haven’t done. So much still to do …’

I could feel his erection growing against my own crotch. With one final return of strength, I wrenched myself free and pushed him away with all the force I could muster. In fact it was enough to throw him off his feet and into the fireplace, where he knocked over the electric fire (fortunately unlit) and ended up half-sitting, half-lying, and rubbing his head where it had inadvertently cracked against the Victorian tiling. It crossed my mind for a moment that I might actually have caused him some injury, but such was my fury that, instead of rushing to his aid, I fumbled with the latch on his door, pulled it open as quickly as I could, and was gone without bothering to close it, and without so much as a backward glance.

*

There is not much more to tell.

I did not see Roger again for more than a year after that. A short, businesslike note arrived from him on the Monday morning, informing me that Crispin Lambert was demanding the payment of a large sum of money. I scraped the sum together (borrowing most of it from my parents) and sent it off to him as soon as I could. After that, things went very quiet. I heard that Roger had left his jobbing firm, and no longer worked on the Exchange floor, but I had no idea what had become of him. Of course I was curious, but I suppressed that curiosity. I began to see that he was a dangerous person. And I began to feel that there was danger, too, in the feelings he had almost managed to arouse in me. I wanted nothing further to do with them. The period of my life that I now entered upon was safe, but colourless. I had been genuinely fond of Roger, and found that life without him was flat, lacking in piquancy. A new secretary joined the firm of Walter, Davis & Warren in the autumn. Her name was Barbara. She came from Birmingham, and she was blonde, busty and pretty. I made overtures towards her. She responded encouragingly. We began to see each other out of office hours. We commenced upon a low-key, chaste and uneventful courtship. I took her to the cinema, I took her to the theatre, I took her to the concert hall. One night early in the summer of 1960 I took her to hear Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet suite being performed at the Albert Hall, in the hope that its grand romantic climaxes would stir in both of our breasts some corresponding passion for each other. It failed to do so. In the interval, she told me that she would rather I didn’t take her to classical music concerts any more. She said that she preferred Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele. She told me this while we were finishing our drinks at the bar – mine a half pint of bitter, hers a Dubonnet and lemon – after which, she went to the ladies’, and I looked across to the other end of the bar and saw Roger staring at me. He was alone, and his face wore a satisfied, knowing smile. He raised his glass to me. I finished my beer and left, without returning the gesture.

The next morning, a note arrived for me at work. It said:There is still time for me to rescue you.The Rising Sun, 9 p.m. tonight.

He was right, of course. I could no longer fight what I knew to be my destiny. I could no longer tell myself lies about my own nature. When I turned my footsteps in the direction of The Rising Sun that night, it was with one fixed intention: to do whatever it was that Roger Anstruther asked of me.

I arrived rather early, at twenty to nine, and ordered a double whisky in order to steady my nerves. I drank it quickly, and ordered another. The second drink lasted for at least half an hour, at the end of which time I looked at my watch, and realized that Roger was late. I ordered a pint of bitter, and took out my notebook, thinking that it would help me to compose myself if I occupied the time in writing. The pub was busy. Another half an hour went by.

It was only then that I began to see the obvious explanation for Roger’s lateness. Could he possibly have been referring to the other Rising Sun? Strange though it may seem, the thought had not occurred to me until this moment. To me, The Rising Sun in Cloth Fair would always be our pub: it was where we’d had our first drink together, and where all our tenderest and most meaningful encounters had subsequently taken place. As for the other one in Carter Lane, I had only been there once – on the evening that Roger had introduced me to Crispin Lambert. It had no special significance or resonance for me at all; but I was aware that Roger had returned there many times, usually to meet Crispin and to confer about their elaborate bets. Had I made a silly, humiliating mistake by assuming that his conversations with me would loom far more impressively in his memory than those sessions with Crispin? Was he sitting there, now, waiting for me, just as I was sitting here, waiting for him?

I delayed another quarter of an hour, and then decided that it was worth taking a chance. I could walk from one pub to the other, if I hurried, and be in with a good chance of finding Roger if he was still there waiting for me. I would cut down West Smithfield, then Giltspur Street, and then straight down past the Old Bailey and into Carter Lane via Blackfriars Lane. It ought to be safe enough. The only danger – and it was a very remote one – was that Roger might have the same thought, leave The Rising Sun at the same time, and come to find me using a different route: up Creed Lane, for instance, then Ave Maria Lane, Warwick Lane, King Edward Street, Little Britain and Bartholomew Close. But this was surely a risk worth taking.

I drained my glass and left the pub, then half-walked, half-ran through the empty streets until the welcoming lights of The Rising Sun were visible in Carter Lane. Short of breath – partly from making such haste, but mainly from anxiety that this crucial evening was dissolving into chaos – I threw open the doors of the pub and rushed inside. There were few people in either the snug or the lounge bar, and Roger, I could see at once, was not among them. A young barman was collecting glasses from the unoccupied tables.

‘Has a young man been in here?’ I demanded. ‘Early twenties – red hair – beard – quite possibly wearing a cape?’

‘Mr Anstruther? Yes, he was here. He left about two minutes ago.’

I let slip a torrent of swear words at this news, much to the barman’s consternation. Then, leaving the pub even more hastily than I’d entered it, I stood for a moment in the street, looking left and right, wondering which way to go. It seemed likely that Roger might have had the same thought as I, and hurried over to the pub I had just left; so, breaking into a sprint now, I retraced my steps up the Old Bailey and Giltspur Street, and was back in The Rising Sun in three or four minutes flat.

‘Are you looking for your friend?’ the barman said, as soon as I appeared. ‘Because he was in here a moment ago, asking after you.’

‘No!’ I shouted, putting my head in my hands, and tearing at my hair. This was too horrific to contemplate. ‘Which way did he go?’

‘Up towards Middle Street, I think,’ said the barman.

But I never found him. I ran outside and spent the next twenty or thirty minutes searching for Roger, calling out his name as I scoured every street within a few hundred yards of Smithfield Market. But he was nowhere to be seen. He was gone.

There was only one last chance. I remembered that there used to be a payphone in the communal hallway of the Notting Hill house where he had his bedsit. I called the number (which I still knew by heart), and waited what seemed like an age for someone to answer, my nervous breath steaming up the windows of the telephone box. But it was no use. It was more than a year since I had last used this number, and when a stranger’s voice finally answered, it was to tell me that Roger no longer lived at this address. After a few seconds’ silence, during which I struggled to regain my power of speech, I thanked the anonymous voice, replaced the receiver slowly, and leaned my forehead against the wall of the telephone box.

So, it was over. Everything was over. Cold, paralysing despair took me in its grasp.

What was I to do now?

I am not sure, in retrospect, how I managed to find myself in the street outside Barbara’s flat in Tooting. Did I get there by bus? Did I take the tube? I cannot remember. That interval of time has been wiped from my memory. It must have been late at night when I arrived, however, for I do remember that I could get no answer from her doorbell, and had to wake her by throwing pebbles at her third-floor window.

She was not especially pleased to see me. She was extremely sleepy. I was extremely drunk. Somehow we managed, none the less, to fall into an embrace. The lovemaking that followed was breathless, fumbled, and quickly finished. Neither of us, I believe, really knew what we were doing, or why we were doing it. They say that ‘You always remember the first time.’ I would have to take issue with that. The whole episode passed, for me, in a kind of haze. What I do remember is lying next to Barbara in bed for the next couple of hours. Neither of us slept, at first. I was staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of the evening’s events through the alcoholic fog that clouded my brain. I do not know what Barbara was thinking. At one point I glanced across at her and saw tears glistening upon her cheeks. At four o’clock in the morning I sneaked out from beneath her bedclothes, left her flat without saying goodbye, and walked all the way back to Highgate through the silent London streets.

I did not go into work that day. My hangover was too severe, for one thing, and for another, I shied away from the prospect of seeing Barbara again. The meeting would surely be too painful and awkward. And it turned out, of course, that she felt exactly the same way. Later that week she handed in her notice, and on the Friday afternoon she was given a small, subdued leaving party, which I did not attend. I was told by colleagues that she had decided to return home to Birmingham. I had no reason to think that I would ever see her again.

Three months later, I received a letter from Barbara’s father. He told me that Barbara was pregnant, and that she believed me to be responsible. It was clear from the letter that he expected me to do what was still considered, in those days, to be the decent thing.

And so, six weeks later, we were married.

We lived for a few months in her parents’ house, near the Cadbury factory in Bournville, but it was not a satisfactory arrangement. I secured a post as assistant librarian at a local technical college, and before too long we had scraped together the money to rent a small flat in Northfield. Our first and only child, Max, was born in February 1961. It would be another five years before we could raise enough money to put down a deposit on a house of our own: at which point we moved to Rubery, to an anonymous, pebbledashed, three-bedroom house, in a characterless street of similar houses not far from the municipal golf course at the foot of the Lickey Hills.

We would live here for most of the next two decades; and it was also here, in the spring of 1967, that I saw Roger Anstruther for the last time.

How he found my address, I do not know. All I know is that he appeared on my doorstep, early one Sunday evening in May. In the City, Roger had always cut a distinctive figure. That evening, materializing without warning in the Birmingham suburbs, dressed as before in a long black cape but with the addition of a matching Fedora tipped stylishly on his head, he seemed positively outlandish. When I first saw him, I was too surprised to speak. I simply beckoned him inside.

I led him into our back room, known to myself, Barbara and Max as the ‘dining room’, although we hardly ever took our meals there. There was no gin and tonic to offer Roger – he had to make do with sweet sherry instead. Barbara joined us for a while, but she had no idea who this exotic stranger was (I had never mentioned Roger to her) and it was clear that she was uneasy in his presence. After a while, she went next door to the living room, to watch television with Max. It was the day, I remember, of Francis Chichester’s return to Plymouth after his triumphant round-the-world voyage, and all three of us had been watching the live television coverage. Even while I was talking to Roger, I could hear the cheering of the crowds through the thin dividing wall, and the stentorian voice of the BBC commentator.

There was some difficult small talk between us at first, but in his usual forthright manner, Roger wasted little time in announcing the point of his visit. He was leaving the country. England, he gave me to understand, no longer had anything to offer him. In the years since I had known him, he had converted to Buddhism, and now wished to travel in the Far East. He was going to start in Bangkok, where he had been offered a job teaching English to the local students. But before departing, he said, there were some ‘ghosts’ from his past, which he felt needed to be ‘laid to rest’.

I took this to be a reference to myself; and told him, rather indignantly, that I did not consider myself to be a ghost, but a living being, composed of flesh and blood.

‘And this,’ said Roger, looking around at our dining room, with its neat array of ornaments, the ‘best’ china put out for display on the dresser, the cheap framed landscapes on the wall, ‘you consider this “living”, do you?’

I did not answer. Fortunately it was the only remark Roger made, that evening, which implied a criticism of the life I had chosen for myself. For the most part, his mood appeared to be conciliatory. He stayed for little more than an hour, having to catch a train back to London Euston in time to pack for his departure the next day. He asked me if I forgave him for the way he had behaved towards me. I told him (not entirely truthfully) that I rarely thought about it, but that, when I did, it was not with any malice or reproach. He told me that he was glad to hear this, and asked if he could write to me, occasionally, from Bangkok. I told him that he could, if he so desired.

The first postcard from Roger arrived about one month later. Over the years it was followed by many others, at wildly irregular intervals, from places as diverse as Hanoi, Beijing, Mandalay, Chittagong, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Manila, T’ai-Pei, Bali, Jakarta, Tibet – anywhere you care to name. He never seemed to stay in the same place for more than a few months. Sometimes he appeared to be working, sometimes just travelling, driven on by that perpetual spirit of restless enquiry that seemed to be an essential part of his nature. Occasionally – very occasionally – I would reply, but I was wary of Roger, always, and careful never to reveal too much about myself or my life. I would simply write a few lines giving him the bare outline of recent events – that Max had passed five of his O-Levels, for instance, or that I’d had a poem accepted for publication in a small local magazine, or that Barbara had died of breast cancer at the age of forty-six.

Last year, some months after Barbara died and Max left home for good, I moved back to my home city of Lichfield. On this occasion I sent out change-of-address cards to only a few select friends: but Roger was one of them, so I suppose that, at some level, I must have liked the feeling that we were still in touch with one another. But I wonder now whether it was the right thing to do. Whether there was any point.

And now, in fact, I have reached a decision: no more.

In a few days’ time I shall leave for Australia, and for the start – God willing – of a new life. And no, I will not tell Roger where I have gone, this time. It is time to forget all that, surely: to make a clean, and long overdue, break with the past. Writing all of this down, at long last, after so many years, has been a lengthy but also a refreshing and even purgative process. Max can read this, one day, if he so chooses, and learn the truth about his father and mother. I hope it will not upset him too much. Meanwhile, I must try to learn something from this protracted incursion to the past. I must take some inspiration, not from my memories of Roger, or of Crispin Lambert (whose jobbing firm, I notice from the newspapers, has just been acquired for a small fortune by a leading clearing bank), but from my visit to the Square Mile itself – that labyrinth of ancient, history-laden streets dedicated to the single-minded accumulation of money. Mired in the past for far too long, the City of London has recently been in the process of reinventing itself. It has proved that such a reinvention is possible, and for that I salute it. From now on, I shall endeavour to do the same thing, in a more modest way; and hope that I might even find some small measure of personal happiness as a result.