On my last afternoon I said, ‘Sebastian, now your mother’s dead’ – for the news had reached us that morning – ‘do you think of going back to England?’

‘It would be lovely, in some ways,’ he said, ‘but do you think Kurt would like it?’

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘you don’t mean to spend your life with Kurt, do you?’

‘I don’t know. He seems to mean to spend it with me. “It’th all right for him, I reckon, maybe,” ’ he said, mimicking Kurt’s accent, and then he added what, if I had paid more attention, should have given me the key I lacked; at the time I heard and remembered it, without taking notice. ‘You know, Charles,’ he said, ‘it’s rather a pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.’

I was able to straighten his money affairs before I left. He had lived till then by getting into difficulties and then telegraphing for odd sums to his lawyers. I saw the branch manager of the bank and arranged for him, if funds were forthcoming from London, to receive Sebastian’s quarterly allowance and pay him a weekly sum of pocket money with a reserve to be drawn in emergencies. This sum was only to be given to Sebastian personally, and only when the manager was satisfied that he had a proper use for it. Sebastian agreed readily to all this.

‘Otherwise,’ he said, ‘Kurt will get me to sign a cheque for the whole lot when I’m tight and then he’ll go off and get into all kinds of trouble.’

I saw Sebastian home from the hospital. He seemed weaker in his basket chair than he had been in bed. The two sick men, he and Kurt, sat opposite one another with the gramophone between them.

‘It was time you came back,’ said Kurt. ‘I need you.’

‘Do you, Kurt?’

‘I reckon so. It’s not so good being alone when you’re sick. That boy’s a lazy fellow – always slipping off when I want him. Once he stayed out all night and there was no one to make my coffee when I woke up. It’s no good having a foot full of pus. Times I can’t sleep good. Maybe another time I shall slip off, too, and go where I can be looked after.’ He clapped his hands but no servant came. ‘You see?’ he said.

‘What d’you want?’

‘Cigarettes. I got some in the bag under my bed.’

Sebastian began painfully to rise from his chair.

‘I’ll get them,’ I said. ‘Where’s his bed?’

‘No, that’s my job,’ said Sebastian.

‘Yeth,’ said Kurt, ‘I reckon that’s Sebastian’s job.’

So I left him with his friend in the little enclosed house at the end of the alley. There was nothing more I could do for Sebastian.

I had meant to return direct to Paris, but this business of Sebastian’s allowance meant that I must go to London and see Brideshead. I travelled by sea, taking the P. & O. from Tangier, and was home in early June.