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penitential bed; it was narrow because that was all his new space allowed. But the discomfort served a purpose. His bed was for reading in only; he would not be bringing back any woman to sleep in it.
    Other than to check the currency markets in the newspapers – and noother item in the newspapers engaged his interest, everything was predictable – he had nothing to do with the time at his disposal. No work. No function. On a good day the little money he had made selling a house he’d inherited made a little more. On a bad day he was brought to the point of having to decide again whether to keep it in dollars or in yen.
    Once in a blue moon, when the money markets turned against him and he was able to summon the will to get out of bed, he sold Taiwanese copies of old masters on the railings outside Hyde Park. He knew a man who knew a man who knew how you could lay hands both on the space and the paintings to fill it. A pastiche of Michelangelo or Gainsborough slapped together in five minutes on an island off China appealed to Marius’s sense of the ridiculous. It made a mockery of meaning. Nothing came from anywhere or had value.
    Otherwise, he had no occupation. He had behaved as badly to his career, such as it might have been – teacher, critic, man of letters, chronicler of the daylit city turning into night – as to the woman he’d once loved. Because abandonment becomes a habit, he had left it to die as well.

    What had caused this change in Marius’s circumstances is simply told. Elspeth had died and he had not been with her. You can not be with someone when they die as a matter of accident or choice. Marius had not been with Elspeth as a matter of choice.
    It had been evident at the professor’s funeral that relations were not as they should have been between a couple who had run away for love – Elspeth to be with Marius every hour God granted, never to miss a moment’s looking into his face or lying alongside his body; Marius, convinced her beauty would continue to enrapture him, making the wildest protestations of devotion and promising to adore her forever. It’s possible Marius had not liked seeing her shedding tears over her ex-husband. Some people are jealous of the dead. It’s also possible he was troubled by retrospective misgivings, whether of the ‘I’ve been a bastard’ sort, or ‘I’ve beena fool’. Whatever the explanation, I had watched him with my own eyes behave abominably to the poor woman, tormenting her with philandering and coldness at a time when it was nothing short of a solemn duty to let her grieve and reprove herself in peace.
    If things had been bad before the funeral they deteriorated quickly after it. Who knows, perhaps the death of the professor stripped Elspeth of what was left of her allure. It’s inconceivable that Elspeth would not have charged Marius throughout their years together with falling for her only because she belonged to another, older, wiser man. And now, appalled and frozen, Marius would have wondered whether she was right.
    Though the disparity in their years had moved and excited him at first – just as the theft of her had excited him at first – it had little by little been losing its fascination until at last he had to admit to himself that he could not bear, for her sake no less than his, to watch her age. Accordingly, though it must be said only after much pilgrimage of the soul and body (of which his removal of what was left of him to Marylebone was the final stage), he spared her the distress of his suffering and left her, to die with dignity, on her own.
    Finis .
    That was three years before. How long he’d been in Marylebone since was anybody’s guess. He liked to keep his movements secret. It went with his cultivated air of accidentality. A Conrad of the Marylebone Archipelago. But he couldn’t have been kicking about for very long or I would surely, as a conscientious not to say compulsive looker-out for erotic opportunity – not for