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Rick owned an art gallery in the town. He liked to give the impression that a sort of precariousness was conferred on this enterprise, by a force that was conflated with creativity itself, but I never saw any sign of it. On the contrary, Rick’s gallery was constantly awash in an apparently inexhaustible fund of notoriety and success, and the more these two commodities could be observed in the infallible business of their synthesis, the clearer an impression of its elemental steadiness could be obtained. The first time Rebecca took me there Rick was in theact of hanging a painting on a wall. His sleeves were rolled up and lengths of his wiry black and grey hair kept flopping in his face as he paced repeatedly away and back again, looking at it. When he saw me he cried out, and flagged me over in the sort of masculine summons that usually precedes a request for physical assistance.
    ‘Just the man I need!’ he shouted.
    I went and stood beside him. In front of us was a painting about which I could tell nothing but that it reminded me of myself, though not in the usual way. I recognised in it a quality of self-consciousness, as though it were not entirely immersed in what it was.
    ‘What do you think?’ said Rick.
    He moved closer to me and folded his thick, white, hairy arms. I folded my arms too. We stood there in a kind of spectatorial intimacy.
    ‘What’s the title?’ I said.
    ‘Oh, fuck, I dunno,’ said Rick, darting heavily forward and looking at something on the frame. ‘It’s Panic II ,’ he declared over his shoulder. ‘I don’t know what happened to Panic I . Maybe it saw Panic II and, you know –’ he guffawed ‘– panicked.’
    Silence fell. We looked at the painting. Rebecca had disappeared. I wished Rick hadn’t asked me what I thought, but at the same time I construed it as a test, something unavoidable that would have found me out one way or another.
    ‘Go on,’ said Rick softly. ‘What do you think?’
    ‘I’m not really the person to ask,’ I said.
    ‘Go on,’ he said, softer still.
    ‘I think it’s slightly – derivative?’ I said finally.
    ‘That does it!’ yelled Rick. ‘I’m not taking it! Three bloody thousand pounds my arse!’
    My heart jolted in my chest, as it had when Paul Hanbury threw me the keys to his car that day on Egypt Hill. On both occasions, for reasons of unintelligible benevolence, I was incorporated into the world of another man’s masculinity.
    Rebecca’s mother Ali had pale green eyes that never seemed to blink. She was small and slight and olive-skinned, and she did everything slowly and with an air of deliberation, keeping herself in the light, holding herself still, as though she lived in a frame and were perpetually making pictures there. She had delicate, unblemished hands with which she touched you frequently and confidentially, and her voice was delicate too, so that her talk, which issued from a single, arterial vein of frankness, was somewhat intoxicating. After an evening spent talking to Ali I would often suffer the next day from feelings of shame and contamination. I interpreted these feelings as proof of a constitutional weakness. They were a sort of allergic reaction, to the moral ambivalence that prevailed amongst the Alexanders, although none of them had ever done anything wrong as far as I knew. It was rather that they had no interest in seeming to be virtuous – they may even have been afraid of it. Instead, they concerned themselves with domineering feats of patronage and ostentatious magnanimity. What impressed me as I came to know them was that, unlike most people, the Alexanders actually invested their integrity entirely in their ostentation. The house in Nimrod Street was a good example of this. For six years we lived there free of charge on the basis of a single conversation, in which Rebecca mentioned that we were thinking of finding a place outside Bath, in the countryside.
    ‘Why the fuck do you want to do that?’ said