When I first met Caber he had recently turned sixty and he was still very handsome. He was unmarried now but had been married three times, twice to the same woman. He had no children. He lived alone. He was tall and even in late middle age so thin he verged on gaunt, his suits hanging off him, as if his body had survived but never fully recovered from some formative ravaging, a childhood wasting disease or blood disorder. His defining features were of course his eyes, in real life the pale, flecked, ­semi-­translucent colour of dirty ice and which, in the black and white publicity photos his publishers insisted upon, appeared agelessly stark and phosphorescent, and seemed to look out and right through you, as an angel’s might. That suggestion of celestial ­judgement – not a bad trait for a writer to have, or appear to have. We were, after all, living in a time when what people wanted from writers was judgement.

I got to know Caber by going to the readings and the talks, and after the readings and the talks, the bars. I had no money but in the bars I would buy a drink and make it last two drinks, staying on even as the crowd thinned out. I watched other people try to ingratiate themselves with him. Some came on deferential and some came on provocative, and he treated all with the same decorous evasiveness. I hung back, I said nothing, sustained by the obscure but persistent hope that if I stuck around long enough, I might eventually become interesting.

The night we became friends we were drinking with two other writers. Caber knew them. The two were a little younger and a lot less famous than Caber. They were performing for him, unleashing one decisive and sweeping opinion after another, about art and life and all the rest of it. Now and then one of them would turn to me, ­bug-­eyed, teeth stained blue from the wine Caber was footing the bill for, and hiss ‘And what do you think?’ then swivel away from me before I could even attempt an answer. So far as they were concerned, I was a deadweight, struck dumb on the edge of the conversation, but Caber was not saying much either. He weathered the pair’s endless pronouncing with a flat tolerant smile and in return offered only morsels of carefully innocuous industry gossip.

After they left, he asked me what I thought of them.

I told him I hadn’t read their books. He said he didn’t mean their books. He meant what did I think of them. I said nothing and this nothing, this merciful absence of human noise, pleased him. Caber fixed me with his eyes of bright, dirty ice.

‘That’s my problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll put up with anybody.’