I wanted to protect him, Richard White, that is. Protect him from ugliness, keep him innocent. I should have trusted him, but the thing is, of course, that to trust you have to be taught to trust. If I’d been capable of it, I wouldn’t have needed to tell him anything.

Outside, it was raining again. As I left the church behind, I felt myself calming down. Once, I met Peter in a museum. After I’d come to London, but before I’d turned things around. By then, he was working in Geneva and on his way to becoming the Peter of recent years, the outward confidence, the nice clothes, stories that would begin, “After the club, Pierre took us all out on his boat on the lake…”

We’d meet when he was over. Sometimes I put on a front that everything was fine. Sometimes I didn’t have the energy. Sometimes Peter gave me money and it felt like being paid off, the envelope of fifties thrust from his hand into mine and tucked away out of sight with undue haste. Like neither of us could bear being asked what it stood for.

The exhibition was entitled The Secret Cabinet. As we paused on the threshold a glance passed between us, something of the old spirit. We went in. Disappointingly, it was about sex, stuffed with lewd bits of pottery, classical erotica, and ancient sex toys that had once belonged in the private collections of Renaissance princes. But I had liked the idea, the idea of a secret place inside a palace where precious things were kept. That you could be the curator, that you could choose what you kept there, in the secret cabinet.

I was high, I think, that day. It made me garrulous. I tried to tell Peter what I was thinking. He cocked his head. “So what’s inside?”

“Moments, words even. Do you remember the foal with the furry ears?” We had gone to one of the racing yards on race day to buy hash from a stable lad who was dealing. The foal had been a couple of months old. It had raced at me across the dark barn, stood shivering under my hands, its muzzle pressed into my armpit. Like it knew me, like it knew there was something special in me. I thought of David too. David in the little room under the eaves at the manor. Listening to wood pigeons with David on the mattress, the light pink as roses.

“There are some moments, Peter, don’t you think? That are never quite over.”

Peter was quiet. In his eyes was the memory of something awful. He had not understood.