I did know the reason. At some point in their friendship my mother had introduced her to a man in London, a young ­American. They’d embarked on an affair. He’d proposed marriage, and with my mother’s encouragement they’d begun making plans for a wedding—a lavish do at St. George’s, Hanover Square, with half of London’s cultural establishment on the guest list. And then abruptly Ralph, the American, had called the whole thing off. Though Julia couldn’t, and didn’t, blame my mother for the debacle, she appeared to have found herself too upset to continue the friendship. The episode had always interested me, not only for its melodramatic aspect (“Julia Jilted!” one of the tabloid headlines ran at the time) but also its contribution to the layer of pathos that was paradoxically what brought about the climax of her television career—her brief apotheosis—gilding her already complex aura with a final burnish of tragedy that, by whatever mysterious alchemy of luck and fashion, impressed her TV bosses as precisely the quality they were looking for in their new current affairs presenter, whose face would soon be beamed every night into a million homes up and down the country.

I’d written copious notes on her for that abandoned project of mine—memories, observations, stories I’d heard from other people, ideas for scenes I wanted to write. I’d looked through them on my laptop before coming this afternoon, and the images they’d stirred, together with the more recent impressions conjured by Marco’s drama, gave me a peculiar sense of being among a multitude of Julias, from different times and places, in different aspects and moods. Julia and my mother gossiping quietly on the sofa in our house in London while my sister looked on, excluded. Julia visiting my father in his office as a young arts reporter, noting with private amusement his brusque way of talking to his secretaries and receptionists, while obstinately failing to flirt with her. Julia at nineteen up a tree with a girlfriend at a Blind Faith ­concert in Hyde Park, shouting out “God, Steve, you are a beautiful man!” in a voice so infectiously enthusiastic, the good-humored crowd below her took up her words as a kind of mass chorus, like a football chant. Julia as an absence from our home, a diminishing echo and source of perplexed regret, of troubling rumors. Julia as Marco’s problem, his seemingly indefatigable persecutor, her disembodied voice spilling out of his answering machine: I’m going to say you raped me . . .