So perhaps they did have things in common. He met her when his university gave her an honorary degree. Not a doctorate, they were too mean for that and she, after all, was only the star of a sitcom. They gave her an M.Lit. (Drama). I expect they made it up for the occasion. Max was at the degree congregation and afterward the Vice-Chancellor asked him to sit next to her at tea. He hadn’t wanted to, he’d tried to get out of it, but after they’d eaten their sandwiches and their meringues he was in love for the first time in his life and a lost man. At least, according to Selina’s often repeated account of this meeting, he was. I heard it for the first time that first evening, Max sitting by, picking at his microwaved prefrozen lasagne and defrosted petits pois, saying nothing but sometimes giving little tight smiles, not sympathizing or approving or even remembering, but as if he knew some secret that Selina and I didn’t. Perhaps it was only his own intellectual superiority to almost everyone.

We had a Sara Lee chocolate cake for the next course and then Nescafé with Longlife cream. My mother was a good cook and I wasn’t used to this sort of food. I sound ungrateful, I was ungrateful, but although I didn’t know it then, it was not only the first but, with the exception of a birthday lunch, the last meal I was ever to be given by Selina and Max. When it was over, the moment we got up from the table, she dismissed me below stairs with the words, “You’ll want to settle in, darling, so we’ll say good night.”

There were five minutes to go before half past eight, and what I also didn’t know then but soon learned was that on every weekday evening she was at home she watched herself in Streetwise. If not at home, she was bound not to be far from a television set, and her hosts at whatever gathering she was at would be obliged to suffer half an hour of banality in Floral Grove, SW12. I really shouldn’t take this superior line, it’s wrong of me, for I watched it myself evening after evening for a long time, having nothing better to do than sit close up to old Mrs. Fisherton’s black-and-white set, staring at the screen rather than at the encroaching walls and descending ceiling.