So much for the puff piece. The man’s tone—glib, presumptuous, a little nervous—put Marco on his guard.

“Which girlfriend?”

“Julia Gault.”

The name surprised him—their affair had been brief, and he’d never actually thought of her as his “girlfriend.”

“Julia’s publishing a memoir?”

“She’s written one. I don’t know that she has a publisher, necessarily, at this point, but we’re keen to run the excerpt regardless. You’re in it, which is why I want to talk to you.”

“What does she say?”

“Well, it’s very candid, and somewhat . . . intimate.”

Marco, who’d already been rifling his long past for an incident in his personal life that could possibly interest an English newspaper, and drawn a complete blank, blurted out the only thing he could think of:

“You’re going to inform me I have a secret illegitimate child—is that it? All grown up presumably, given how long ago our little fling was . . .”

Sauer chuckled.

“No, nothing like that. Why don’t I email you the relevant passage, Marco, then you can read it and we can talk again?”

“Okay.”

“You may dispute one or two details, in which case we’d certainly consider running something in tandem by yourself. We’d be very open to that, in fact.”

“Send it over,” Marco told him.

An email arrived a few minutes later: “Here you go. Like I say, just taking your temperature at this point! Let me know your thoughts. Yours ever, Mel.”

The passage from Julia Gault’s memoir was attached.

I should mention that the name Julia Gault was familiar to me, and had been for almost as long as I could remember, though it was years since I’d heard it spoken. There was a time when I thought I might write a long novel, even a series of novels, about that distant English world of ours, in which Julia’s recurrent appearance at the periphery of my life as she transited through the many phases of her own, would form a significant motif. I can’t say I knew her in any way that properly qualified me to write about her. I was a shy teenager in the period when she was a regular presence in our house, and I don’t think I ever had a private conversation with her. But she made a strong impression on me, and as an adult, qualified or not, I spent many hours over many years making notes and sketches for what, in the grandiose ambition consuming me, was intended to be a portrait of her in the monumental manner of Proust’s Odette or Anthony Powell’s Pamela Flitton.