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be quite happy to overlook all the other stuff on the strength of it.
    Ben was tall, pale and dreamy. He had Phoebe’s troubling dark eyes, and used to drift into the dole office in a green velvet jacket, like Percy Shelley. He was romantic and soulful, and still relied quite heavily on his flowing dark ringlets to keep him in free concert tickets.
    Fritz was darker. He had Jimmy’s beautiful voice, and a high color beneath clear olive skin. His black eyes snapped like firecrackers. He had immense energy, and rather scary charm. I had once seen him in evening dress (for the party after his girlfriend’s wedding), and thought he looked like an old-fashioned picture of the devil.
    But all my female friends swore they wanted more than good looks in a man. And the biggest talking-up campaign in the world couldn’t make Fritz and Ben into anything but expensive luxuries. Ben was a wonderful musician, who studied at the Royal Academy of Music. He was, however, too “sensitive” to perform or to teach. Mostly he sat at home, driving the neighbors crazy by playing loud Scriabin in the small hours, on the grand piano his parents had bought him for his twenty-first birthday.
    As for Fritz, he was the very worst sort of unemployed actor. Being handsome should have guaranteed him some sort of a career, but he was
dreadfully pretentious, perhaps to mask his glaring lack of talent. We had been at Oxford together, and I had watched him being talentless in several college productions. His Iago was particularly wince-making. He spent the whole time facing upstage and muttering with his hands in his pockets. He was a perfectly good medical student, so what on earth had made him give up medicine? What wicked charlatan had persuaded him to act for his living?
    But I knew I was being too hard on him. I should be honest. The fact is, all through my teens and early twenties, I had a major crush on Fritz. He played a starring role in my dreams for years. I don’t mean only the sexy dreams—I mean fantasies about impressing people. Fritz was always present, being impressed and later declaring undying love, in every one of my dreams of future glory. In those dreams I accepted the Booker Prize, the editorship of the Guardian and the school cup for growing candytuft before large crowds that inevitably contained my father and Fritz.
    Deep in my memory lay our one, solitary encounter. It was never mentioned by either of us, and I suspected Fritz had forgotten. Why shouldn’t he forget? It belonged to another era. We had just finished our A levels, and the Darlings—typically—threw a party. I remember feeling tipsy and euphoric and unusually bold. I was outside, in the warm summer garden, beside the climbing frame. Fritz appeared out of the dusk, and silently stood beside me. I remember feeling slightly sick with nerves, wondering if he could see my pulse hammering in my neck. We had a long, breathless moment of staring at each other, as if seeing for the first time, then Fritz took my face between his hot hands and kissed me, and when his tongue slid into my mouth I nearly passed out. I don’t know what might have happened, if dear Ben had not suddenly erupted into the garden at the head of a conga line.
    That was the end of my kiss. At the time, I was sure there would be another. We promised each other that we would meet at Oxford. But then Fritz went off backpacking in Italy, I went to New York for a tense few weeks with my father, and by the time we actually got to Oxford at the end of the summer, we had missed the moment. Fritz was a theater star and sex symbol, and I was an obscure, earnest student of literature. No matter how hard I tried to impress him (for example, by constantly mentioning the campaigning magazine I had started, to keep my college
women-only), he would only see me as little Grimble from next door. I’d assumed I’d be running into him constantly, but I was lucky to get even a