But this year, within weeks of the first wave of lockdowns, an NYRB piece by James Wood articulated the critic’s eerie experience of reading the book just as New York shut down around him. That same weekend the actress Emily Ratajkowski lauded the book on Instagram. Articles and social media mentions proliferated and soon The Low, Shimmering Black Drone made a belated debut on the bestseller list. In short order a streaming service announced they had bought the rights to the novel and were ­fast-­tracking it into a mini-series. Now journalists were ringing and emailing Caber day and night to ask him how he had come to write this uncannily prescient fable about a society struck by a catastrophic exogenous event that renders unmediated social intercourse so interpersonally hazardous that eventually everyone ends up sealed inside their homes, alone and increasingly deranged.

‘Basically I just liked the phrase “the low, shimmering black drone”,’ he told me. ‘It appealed to my weakness for excessively poetic titles.’

We were in the sitting room, drinking cognac. Buddy was up on the sofa tucked right in beside Caber, Caber stroking his fur. Even the excitable Linus was down on all fours on the rug in front of the ­switched-­off fireplace, watching something indiscernible through the enormous windows overlooking Caber’s floodlit back garden, which to me seemed only empty and still.

‘From that I spun out this flimsy, clumsy piece of ­sub-­Saramago-­ian bullshit that none of my editors really liked, and actually I didn’t even like, but it was done and I needed the money. So we put it out, it dropped off the face of the earth and once the wound of its vanishing reception crusted over I never thought about it again.’

‘What’s it feel like to be a prophet?’ I asked him one drink on.

‘I want you to know I have emphatically refuted any charges of prophecy, prescience or perspicuity. Good Lord. Imagine claiming someone was a prophet just because they said “in the future things are going to get worse”.’

‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘the reason I wanted you over wasn’t just to say goodbye. I need a favour. I was thinking you could stay here. Until I get back.’

He nodded at Linus and patted Buddy’s haunch.

‘I can’t bring these guys with me. I need someone here with them. I need them walked every day. I’ll pay you. Six hundred dollars a week. You can eat me out of house and home, drink as much wine as you like. Groceries are delivered every Sunday, the cleaner comes every Friday. Stay here, write here, do what you like. I don’t think you’ll want for anything.’