‘What?’ Ellen had asked me a question.

‘Were any of them married?’ She wasn’t laughing when she asked me that.

‘Yes.’ I looked away from her unsmiling face. ‘I’m not going to apologise for it. I never asked any of them to care about me, I just wanted some fun. I never said I wanted them. I never asked any of them to leave their wives and children. I’m not going to apologise.’

‘I’m not asking you to.’

The sun began to lose its heat, fall towards the sea and we fell silent. Ellen’s dogs came padding out to the deck and slumped against her, panting quietly. She stroked their fur, rubbing the short hair above their eyes the wrong way and then smoothing it, as I thought, not for the first time, about the unexpected blackness of a hairgrip lying on a white pillow.

‘Was there anyone who mattered more than the others?’ A clamour of rooks clattered out of the plane trees behind the house, cawing raucously. ‘Yes.’

‘You don’t have to tell me.’ A dog yawned and toppled sideways, stretching his paws out, hairy toes separating. ‘I know.’

Now, while Ellen sleeps, worn out by the efforts of climbing into the attic and keeping scandal at bay, I sit here and write this.

Miles. Miles Brandrin — the one who mattered more than the others. Miles — whom I noticed often as he walked from Devonshire House to the lecture rooms, carrying folders and books, whose easy walk and long blond hair caught my eye. Miles — who sat next to me in the Ram as I marked undergraduate essays on Fichte’s being inconveniently stuck on an ought-to-be.

‘Hi,’ he said.

I looked at him and back to the essay.

He put a tanned hand on my pale, bare arm. ‘I’d very much like to take you out for dinner. I realise that I’ll have to wait some time for the privilege - your diary is probably full for the foreseeable future. But if you can find a free evening please let me know. My name’s Miles Brandrin. You can put a note in my pigeon hole in the office.’

‘Are you married?’ I asked.

‘Yes’ he said, and smiled. ‘So you’re safe.’ And he walked away.

Arrogant bastard, I thought, writing a note to Tim cancelling our drink that evening and writing another to Miles, saying I’d be happy to meet him later that day.

I read what I’ve written and I’m astonished by the degree of my confidence, by the extent of my own indifference and arrogance. This happened eight years ago and it seems as if it happened in a different lifetime. Which, of course, it did.

1 January 1985

The beginning of a new journal — virgin paper, clean hard covers. One of my many rituals. I went into the attic this afternoon to perform another ritual: putting last year’s collection in the trunk. When I gathered them together this morning there were very few for a year, thin pickings indeed. It seems that when a year is easy, when it rolls by without hitches or bolts of the unexpected, I write far less. As I get older I read more and write less. I vowed I would simply climb the ladder, find the trunk and put the journals in but I was, as usual, distracted by what I found up there. John’s surfboard always surprises me, rising up, ghost-like, from the corner. Then there are the journals of past years. Always I think I’ll ignore them but I end up opening them at random to remind myself of other times.