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with greater understanding – see Fortune more as pimp than whore. Explain otherwise why Marius, with all the world to choose from, and at a time when I was in urgent need of his particular genius, was impelled to come and live so close to me that, even leaving aside our shared interest in antiquarian books, our paths were bound eventually to cross, and I was bound eventually to reel him in.

HE WAS LIVING, I DISCOVERED, ABOVE A BUTTON SHOP IN A LANE OF small romantic restaurants and chic boutiques at the epicentre of the action, as though to show himself each day what he was missing. To one side of him was a curtain-maker, to the other a stain removalist’s. Left and he was in Wigmore Street, right he was in Harley Street. Day or night there was nothing a man needed that he couldn’t immediately find – art, music, cheese, shoes, sausages, specialists of the spine, the brain, the cardiovascular system, new books, antiquarian books, the bored wives of retired professors – except that there was nothing he believed he any longer needed. Other than the stain removalist.
    He was as disordered sexually as I was, in his way, only he couldn’t get out of bed to enjoy it. It wasn’t laziness, it was torpor. He had done a terrible thing and wanted nothing more to do with the world in which he’d done it.
    He woke early, often before dawn, with a worm of bile coiled around his gut. Some mornings he wondered if the worm of bile was his gut. He would think of going to his desk to write something, epic or epigram, but automatically reached out instead to turn on his bedside lamp by the light of which he would go on reading whatever had occupied the previous night’s vacant hours before he had slid, neither willing nor unwilling, into sleep. Usually what he read was modern foreign literature in translation – the chill eroticism of Czech or Italian rendered into plainsong English being all he could digest, like cold weak tea.
    The sort of prose, incidentally, which I feel I should write when I describe Marius, rendering him as the type of heartless English libertine the French love to fantasise about, like Sir Stephen in Story of O , a man in whom O detects ‘a will of ice and iron’. But that’s one falsity of porno I cannot swallow: its chastity of expression. In my fear of Marius – in my greed for Marius – I teemed with words.
    In fear of himself, however, he was not so productive. On his desk he kept a lined notebook which he’d bought when he was a student nearly twenty years before. In this he had intended to write an English version of Baudelaire’s spleen-fuelled prowlings around late-night Paris. He had the title. Four o’clock . That was the hour that excited Marius. Never mind midnight. Midnight was obvious. If the twenty-four-hour day marked nothing but the fluctuations of our desires, four o’clock was, for him, the hairspring hour. Once upon a time it had affected him like a transfusion of vital fluids. He walked the streets and felt the oscillation between day and evening as a change in the temperature of his own body. He heard his blood heat. Now he merely observed it through his window above the button shop. Four o’clock in the city – the shop assistants looking at their watches; the waiters, with that violence of gesture peculiar to waiters, throwing their cigarette stubs into the street and laying out clean tablecloths; barmen polishing glasses and looking at their reflections in the bowls; men and women on the streets quickening their pace, their minds elsewhere, heading home to change, pausing only to buy flowers, chocolate, wine, lingerie – as though the whole city were a lover thinking about its date, but a date which, for the cycle of expectation and disappointment to begin again, had to end unsatisfactorily.
    His bed was narrow and uncomfortable, like a monk’s. It had been the fourth-best guest bed in his previous life. But what did he need now? He wouldn’t have admitted it was a