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What does she know?’
    ‘I told her what you do, what you’re studying. I told her where you come from. I told her who your favourite writers and composers and painters and pop groups were. I told her what sort of clothes you wear, what you like to eat, what you like to drink. I described your personality. I told her you were a bit pompous, and a bit conceited, and a bit greedy, and a bit arrogant, but that you were basically OK.’
    ‘I see. Fine. So now there isn’t a damn thing she doesn’t know about me. Thanks a lot.’ Another thought struck him. ‘Did you tell her what I looked like?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Oh, good. Well, I appreciate your restraint.’
    ‘I sent her a photograph. You know – the one of you sunbathing, in Capri?’
    Richard got up in silence and withdrew to his bedroom. Later in the morning he heard Miles leave the flat. As soon as the front door had closed, he went into Miles’s bedroom and began a patient and thorough search for Karen’s letter. It had been fairly carefully concealed, among a pile of old lecture notes in a rarely used drawer. The relevant passage, which Richard’s eyes found with determined alacrity, was as follows:
    Now you must tell me all about this intriguing friend of yours. I’ve managed to pick up bits and pieces from his letters, but he doesn’t give much of himself away. What does he look like? What does he talk like? I bet he’s from the south. He strikes me as being a bit full of himself, but nice with it.
    You may wonder what all this has got to do with our supposedly strictly intellectual correspondence. To be honest, I didn’t think I’d ever find myself getting interested in these details. ‘What does it matter,’ I thought, ‘so long as our minds meet?’ But then, inevitably I suppose, I started to get glimpses of the person behind the thoughts, the ideas, the arguments; and a very nice person it seemed too. So I thought, sod it, friendship is more important than some daft academic experiment. So please, do me this favour, Miles. Be Pandarus to my Criseyde; be Pirovitch to my Klara. Just to satisfy my curiosity, that’s all.
    Richard put the letter away, feeling mildly betrayed and wildly excited. The hours until the next phone call seemed to pass very slowly.
    That evening, they discussed the politicization of the plastic arts in the twentieth century, in the wake of those European painters (particularly the Nabis) who had chosen to involve themselves with an increasingly polemical theatre. This conversation lasted for about ten minutes, at which point Karen asked Richard if he was aware that an exhibition currently running at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham was reported to provide some striking and recent examples of what she liked to describe as ‘the politics of composition’.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I read about it.’
    ‘It would be nice if we’d both seen it. Then we’d have something more concrete to talk about.’
    ‘Well, I’m free tomorrow.’
    ‘So am I.’
    ‘Let’s go tomorrow, then.’
    ‘Separately, of course.’
    ‘Obviously. You go in the morning, and I’ll go in the afternoon.’
    ‘I can’t make the morning.’
    ‘Oh. Neither can I.’
    ‘Besides,’ said Karen, with a touch of hesitation, ‘it would really make more sense if we could talk about particular paintings… you know, while we were looking at them.’
    Richard drew in his breath. ‘That’s very true,’ he said.
    They met by the bookstall at two o’clock. There they exchanged broken words – too broken to be recorded here – while their eyes took in the details of each other’s faces and bodies. For about half an hour, they looked at the exhibition, their shoulders in nervous proximity, their eyes talking a new language of quick, embarrassed glances, their heads now together, now apart, as they attempted fitfully to interest themselves in discussion of the paintings. The gallery was uncomfortably warm. Outside, they found that a light snow had