“Anyway, that’s when I met her. She was assigned to me as a researcher. Actually, what she told me was she’d finagled the assignment. I was a desirable commodity then, professionally speaking. We worked very closely together, and we’d often go for a drink at the end of the day. She seemed a bit sphinxlike at first but she turned out to have strong opinions and we had a sparring, mocking relationship that kept me on my toes. She used to call me a closet colonialist because in her opinion my embrace of third world politics was just an update on Kipling—white man’s burden, etcetera, with journalists as the new pukka sahibs. I’d defend myself furiously, but she was right, in a way, and I knew it, which was part of what attracted me to her. I was physically attracted, too, obviously. I mean, she was gorgeous. She looked like a lioness, I used to think. She had this wide, wide face with a sort of distant smile as if she was dreaming about something simultaneously enjoyable and highly dangerous. I’d say for sure we both knew we were going to end up in bed sooner or later . . .”

The sun was going down behind the woods as Marco talked, lighting the hillsides opposite. I was half-listening, slipping off into my own memories of Julia. I mentioned that she’d been a presence in our house during my teens, but for a period she’d actually been something more in the nature of a fixture. My mother had befriended her—“taken her up,” as they used to say—inviting her to dinner in London or for the weekend in Sussex, connecting her with influential friends, bringing her along to first nights and private views. She was friendly to me, in the amused way of worldly young women with tongue-tied teenage boys. I didn’t see anything lion- or lioness-like about her. Physically, she reminded me of the Flora figure in Botticelli’s Primavera, with that inward look expressive of both bashfulness and sensuality, but there was certainly a fierceness about her—an air of intensely but privately pursued pleasure—that always intrigued me. And beyond this there was a radiance about her that, whatever its real cause, existed for me in my generally befogged condition at that time, as an idea of reprieve. It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me she incarnated the idea of joyous freedom that I believed life consisted of once you came through the long tunnel of adolescence. I had a crush on her, also.

5

5

MARCO HAD PLANNED to spend two nights with us, but the next morning at breakfast he asked me to drive him to the train station right away. He’d decided to fly to London. He’d already bought a ticket from JFK online, and just needed to pick up his passport in Brooklyn.