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be erased by ‘giving’ Simon my virginity. He talked for weeks beforehand about when, where, how it should be achieved. He thought Rome, or maybe Venice; I thought as near as possible to Twickenham, in case I bled. In the end, it was a new trendy circular hotel – the Ariel? – by Heathrow airport, where we spent the night before an early-morning flight to somewhere or other, I forget. He wanted to do a practice run with a banana – he had brought a banana specially. I said ‘Oh for heaven's sake!’ and told him to do it properly. He talked a lot about how he hoped Minn would do Bubl the honour of welcoming him into her home. Somewhere in the middle of the talking, he was inside me, and it was over. I thought, ‘Oh well, that was easy. Perhaps now I can get a proper boyfriend.’
    (I think the word that best describes my entire sex life with Simon is negligible. I never experienced even a glimmer of an orgasm while I was with him. He was a far from ardent lover – he seemed to enjoy waffling about Minn and Bubl more than actually doing anything. And whereas my games mistress was always bellowing across the changing room ‘But you said it was your period last week!’, Simon always took my word for it when I said that Minn was ‘indisposed’. So although I spent many nights in bed with Simon, often in foreign hotel rooms, very little ever happened.)
    The affair – if it was an affair – drifted on, partly because no proper boyfriends showed up, partly because I had become used to my strange double life of schoolgirl swot during the week, restaurant-going, foreign-travelling sophisticate at weekends. And this life had alienated me from my schoolfriends – if they said ‘Are you coming to Eel Pie Jazz Club on Saturday?’ I would say ‘No, I'm going to Paris with Simon.’ Of course my friends all clamoured to meet Simon but I never let them. I was afraid of something – afraid perhaps that they would ‘see through him’, see, not the James Bond figure I had described, but this rather short, rather ugly, long-faced, splay-footed man who talked in different accents and lied about his age, whose stories didn't add up.
    Because by now – a year into the relationship – I realised that there was a lot I didn't know about Simon. I knew his cars (he had several Bristols), and the restaurants and clubs he frequented, but I still didn't know where he lived. He took me to a succession of flats which he said were his, but often they were full of gonks and women's clothes and he didn't know where the light switches were. So these were other people's flats, or sometimes empty flats, in Bayswater, South Kensington, Gloucester Road. He seemed to have a limitless supply of them.
    Where did I imagine he lived? Incredible as it seems now – but this is a reminder of how young I was – I imagined that he lived with his parents but was ashamed to tell me. I pictured this ancient couple in some East End slum performing strange rituals in Yiddish. The fact that he told me his parents were well off and lived in Cricklewood was neither here nor there: I preferred my version. I suspect this is always the way with conmen: they don't even have to construct a whole story, their victims fill in the gaps, reconcile the irreconcilables – their victims do most of the work. Simon hardly had to con me at all, because I was so busy conning myself.
    But by now there was a compelling reason for staying with Simon – I was in love. Not with Simon, obviously, but with his business partner Danny and his girlfriend Helen. I loved them both equally. I loved their beauty, I loved their airy flat in Bedford Square where there were Pre-Raphaelites on the walls and harpsichord music on the hi-fi. At that time, few people in Britain admired the Pre-Raphaelites but Danny was one of the first, and I eagerly followed. He lent me books on Rossetti and Burne-Jones and Millais, and sometimes flattered me by showing me illustrations in auction catalogues