The anonymity of the ever-changing lecture rooms and the fact I didn’t live in halls meant that my loneliness was undetected by others. A couple of students did ask me if I’d like to join them for a drink but I never went because I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know what would be expected of me. I was nineteen and for six years I’d been alone. I guess I’d forgotten how to be anything else. So I went to the lectures, read the books, wrote the essays and walked around London. My size made me safe if not invisible, which I would have preferred. Gradually I became used to the movement of the city and on long winter nights I’d walk for miles along unfamiliar streets. It’s easy to disappear in London because other people always assume that you have a purpose, a goal you’re trying to achieve, that you have a life. I learned the tricks of walking as if running late, carrying newspapers and books, of looking as if I was waiting for someone. Which I was: still I scanned crowds for my father.

At the end of my first year I sat my exams and failed the logic paper quite spectacularly. It was the finest failure the college had ever known — a mark so pitiful the authorities couldn’t even bring themselves to tell me what it was. Dr Price asked to see me and I went once again to his office, where he explained, quite gently, that I had to pass the logic module to get my degree, that I'd have to take it again the next year and the year after that if necessary. I looked at him and thought of sitting in the luxury of Caroline’s opulent flat, abandoned to the company of Olaf and his volcanoes, stranded in the wetlands of Pago Pago for months and years to come. I thought of my mother sailing effortlessly through her university days. She’d finished her degree, even her Master’s, by the age of twenty and here I was, incapable even of putting Hackshaw and his jig in their place. I didn’t want to do it. Not because I was afraid of failure but because I was convinced of it.

I stood up, hit my head on the lampshade, shattering the bulb, and said, Tn that case, I don’t think there’s much point in carrying on,’ as I brushed fine glass from my shoulders, picked it out of my hair and beard.

‘I'm sure that if you had extra tutorials—’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘But what will you do? Switch subjects?’

‘I’m going to be a carpenter.’

‘An honest profession,’ he said, and shook my hand.

I walked back to the flat, smiling at strangers as Olaf receded in my memory. St James’s looked beautiful, spotted with green and white deck-chairs, the trees not yet heavy with the lead poisoning of summer. I reached Hyde Park Corner and fell in love with London at last, with the circus of cars wheeling the roundabout, the avenue of Park Lane and the black and gold railings of the park itself. All of it. I sat by the Serpentine watching horses prance down Rotten Row kicking up dark sand and dust, and lay on the grass. I fell asleep in the sun and when I woke up I saw Merboy’s face turning red.