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embarrassed to have talked at length, as if he had been boring me.
    â€˜Everything you’ve just said would be really good for my interview,’ I suggest enthusiastically. ‘As long as I can remember it by the time I get back to Cambridge. I’m not sure people have ever thought about art, or even about life, like that up there. It just seems to make so much more sense.’
    â€˜Well, it might be just your charm saying that, because one never really manages to say things directly enough,’ Francis says, fingering the thin watch on his wrist with unexpectedly long, thick white fingers. The fingers of a butcher, I find myself thinking. Or even a murderer. ‘Now listen,’ he goes on, ‘the restaurants round here are all rather dreary – there’s something called the Ordinary and I tried it the other day and I have to say it was
very
ordinary. There’s the Hungry Horse of course but the people who run it now have started drowning everything in these terrible sauces, so shall we find a taxi and see if we can get a table at Sheekey’s? They at least can give you a piece of plain grilled fish. I think I’ve told you about this new friend I have called George, and he happens to terribly like eating there. Would that be a bore for you? I’ve also invited Sonia Orwell, who I think you might quite like.’
    We make our way gingerly down the ship’s ladder and out into the early London evening. It must have rained while we were talking because the cobblestones outside the mews glisten under the street lamps and there is an odd metallic tang to the air. We clamber into a cab which heads nimbly off towards the West End. Francis has gone silent, holding on to the handle above his seat with both meaty hands, apparently lost in thought. I’ve just noticed how smartly dressed he is, in a grey flannel suit with a blue button-down shirt and a black knitted tie, although the desert boots he’s got on make the whole thing look less formal. I’m wearing the best I can muster: a grey polo-neck, a sportsjacket I’ve recently dyed dark blue, charcoal trousers and my rather cracked, Italian winkle-pickers. I watch Francis’s profile against the evening light: not exactly handsome, but strong, well carved, like the figurehead on a ship’s prow or a gargoyle sticking out against the elements.
    Francis keeps checking his watch, a clearly expensive wafer-thin model on a gold strap, but we arrive early at the restaurant. He is known here and warmly welcomed like a regular, which perhaps he is since he clearly dines as well as lunches out every day. At all events he seems to be treated as a regular wherever we go, I think with admiration and an odd sense of pride. A table is no trouble, of course, and another bottle of Krug arrives in a silver ice bucket. I sense that Francis has not said as much as he would have liked to in our earlier talk, so I try my luck, asking him if he could tell me more. After all, I’ve got a key article for my magazine riding on this.
    â€˜Well, I suppose I could what’s called tell all, if anyone could be bothered to listen. Whoever tires of talking about themselves? Although when you hear others droning on you think how dreary you must sound yourself. Anyone’s life sounds dreary, I suppose, unless it’s presented in a certain way. That’s the thing. At times I do feel there are a great many things I’d like to talk about. Growing up in Ireland. And about Berlin, which was very, very curious at the time I happened to be there. Or about why I think painting is in the situation it is in now. Those kinds of things.
    â€˜But then, at other times, I wish I’d never let anything about myself out. When I feel that, I only wish that when I die, just before, I’ll be able to see everything to do with me simply blow up. Just like that. Blow up so there’d be nothing left.’
    â€˜Could one say that your