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impossible for him not to leave them. It was the disappointment of his life. Framed to be another Orpheus who would retrieve his loved one from Hades, who would, at the last, look back over a lifetime of devotion to her, shedding tears of unbearable sorrow when she faded for the final time in his arms - 'My love, my only love!' - here he was instead, passing himself off as someone he wasn't, a universal lookalike who didn't feel as others felt, reduced to swallowing the fragrances of parks and weeping for losses which, in all decency, were not his to suffer.
    So that was something else he might have envied Libor - his bereavement.
    5

    He stayed at the park gates maybe half an hour, then strode back with measured steps towards the West End, passing the BBC - his old dead beat - and Nash's church where he had once fallen in love with a woman he had watched lighting a candle and crossing herself. In grief, he'd presumed. In chiaroscuro. Crepuscular, like the light. Or like himself. Inconsolable. So he'd consoled her.
    'It'll be all right,' he told her. 'I'll protect you.'
    She had fine cheekbones and almost transparent skin. You could see the light through her.
    After a fortnight of intense consolation, she asked him, 'Why do you keep telling me it'll be all right? There isn't anything wrong.'
    He shook his head. 'I saw you lighting a candle. Come here.'
    'I like candles. They're pretty.'
    He ran his hands through her hair. 'You like their flicker. You like their transience. I understand.'
    'There's something you should know about me,' she said. 'I'm a bit of an arsonist. Not serious. I wasn't going to burn down the church. But I am turned on by flame.'
    He laughed and kissed her face. 'Hush,' he said. 'Hush, my love.'
    In the morning he woke to twin realisations. The first was that she had left him. The second was that his sheets were on fire.
    Rather than walk along Regent Street he turned left at the church, stepping inside the columns, brushing its smooth animal roundness with his shoulder, and found himself among the small wholesale fashion shops of Riding House and Little Titchfield Streets, surprised as always at the speed with which, in London, one cultural or commercial activity gave way to another. His father had owned a cigarette and cigar shop here - Bernard Treslove: Smokes - so he knew the area and felt fondly towards it. For him it would always smell of cigars, as his father did. The windows of cheap jewellery and gaudy handbags and pashminas made him think of romance. He doubled back on himself, in no hurry to get home, then paused, as he always paused when he was here, outside J. P. Guivier & Co. - the oldest violin dealer and restorer in the country. Though his father played the violin, Treslove did not. His father had dissuaded him. 'It will only make you upset,' he said. 'Forget all that.'
    'Forget all what?'
    Bernard Treslove, bald, browned, straight as a plumb line, blew cigar smoke in his son's face and patted his head affectionately. 'Music.'
    'So I can't have a cello, either?' J. P. Guivier sold beautiful cellos.
    'The cello will make you even sadder. Go and play football.'
    What Julian did was go and read romantic novels and listen to nineteenth-century operas instead. Which also didn't please his father, for all that the books which Treslove read, like the operas he listened to, were on his father's shelves.
    After this exchange, Bernard Treslove went into his own room to play the violin. As though he didn't want to set a bad example to his family. Was it only Treslove's fancy that his father wept into his violin as he played?
    So Julian Treslove played no instrument, though every time he passed J. P. Guivier's window he wished he did. He could, of course, have taken up music any time he wanted to after his father died. Look at Libor who had learnt to play the piano in his eighties.
    But then Libor had someone to play it for, no matter that she was no longer with him. Whereas he . . .

    It was as he