I was. I’d guessed what he meant but I didn’t want to ­acknowledge it. I’d known only one person in my life who’d killed himself, a school friend who’d jumped from a building. He’d led a fairly desperate existence from the age of fifteen when, for ­reasons he never discussed, he walked out of his parents’ comfortable home in Highgate and moved into a squalid bedsit, where he lived like some Dickensian waif, betting on horses (for which he had a certain gift), eating tinned soup and trying to keep up with his homework. Uncomplaining, unassuming, introverted to the point of not being able to look even his friends in the eye, he’d come to embody my idea of what it was to be “a suicide,” which was to say someone about whom the surprising thing (at least in hindsight) wasn’t that he killed himself, but that he kept going for as long as he did. Marco, secure on the foundations of his happy and privileged upbringing, fit and vigorous even under the stress of his resurgent ordeal, could not have been less like him. I knew rationally that there were plenty of different reasons why people killed themselves, but I couldn’t take him seriously as a candidate for that particular act. He was too vivid even in his dejection—too solidly anchored in life.

“Marco,” I said, as gently as I could, “I mean, come on!”

“What?”

“You have a daughter . . .”

“It’d be for her sake, mainly, if I do it,” he said.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“My sake too, obviously. I don’t have the temperament to live as a pariah. I’m too attached to the things I’d lose. I like working. I like being on panels and juries. I like being invited to dinner parties at people’s houses. I like having an intelligent, glamorous girlfriend. I like knowing my daughter and her friends feel comfortable around me. I care what the world thinks of me. Maybe too much, but that’s the way I am. I don’t have your appreciation for solitude, or the wilderness.”

It was an eloquent speech, and it touched me, but at the same time its very eloquence affirmed my sense of his fundamental robustness.

“I understand,” I said. “But still . . .”