‘You’re back,’ Laura said.

‘Just got in.’ I smiled into the phone, wondered why I was faking a smile she couldn’t see. ‘I got your invitation. Congratulations. I’m sorry I missed it, I wish I could have been there.’ I tried to remember the cover story I’d given. North Africa; a posting on behalf of the Department for International Development. ‘How are you?’

We spoke about what she’d been up to. She taught French literature at King’s; had a doctorate in symbolist poetry. She was poised, articulate, with a life lived locally, with work and interests and friends around her, and now a husband. I found, as I always did upon returning, that without a role to play I suffered from aphasia. I opened my mouth and had nothing to say. There was that icy blankness behind the face. Perform, I thought. Imagine you’re trying to recruit her.

‘I thought of you,’ I said.

‘Really?’

And then, because I had backed myself into a corner, because I wanted something to give, I said: ‘Yes. I visited the house where Rimbaud lived, in Aden.’

It was true though, I had thought of her then. I had persuaded my fixer to show me where Rimbaud lived when the poet’s self-exile led him to this corner of the world. Laura would have been fascinated. And I thought of Rimbaud himself, and the line in his letter from Harar that had always stuck with me: Je ne compte pas rester longtemps ici. Je n’ai pas trouvé ce que je présumais. I did not find what I had expected. What had he expected in dusty Yemen? A twenty-six-year-old, picking up exotic languages and diseases and a lot of second-hand Remington rifles, waiting on the edge of the desert as he prepared to head to Abyssinia to sell guns to the king. Poet turned arms dealer. At university, when I first stumbled upon this trajectory, it seemed wondrous and inexplicable. And I had surpassed it without the slightest scrap of insight.

‘His house is still there?’ she asked.

‘Just about. It used to be something of a tourist destination.’

It had been looted, closed down, but I found the old caretaker chewing khat; when I bribed him to unlock the door, he spasmed with a cough so violent he sprayed blood over my wad of tissue-soft rials. Inside, there were empty glass cases, rotting wooden furniture, scattered papers that weren’t, to my disappointment, anything to do with Rimbaud but recent governmental directives on agriculture.

‘Why didn’t you let me know?’ she asked.

‘I was so busy.’

‘Do you have pictures?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t think to take any.’

‘And what development work were you doing in Yemen?’

‘Water,’ I said. ‘Mostly. For the refugees. The war’s caused a bit of a crisis. Also some education projects.’

‘The war,’ she said, uncertainly. ‘Of course.’