He felt attacked on all sides for simply being who he was. He recalled Galina saying that for her, leaving Russia was not really a choice, that she was pushed to act by outside circumstances impinging on who she was. It occurred to him that the real choice for him was the same impossible one as for her: not to be the person he was, not to be himself.

The last leaves dangled brown and dead from the branches, a sheet of newspaper lifted by the wind slapped against his legs, and as he walked, his mind filled with the oddest desire: to be held inside an Old Master — he could see it so clearly — a huge canvas of a family group, all of them wearing Elizabethan collars, and he, the youngest child, forever surrounded by parents and siblings. Forever young, forever loved, forever safe.

Winston was gone and he missed him. He might have AIDS and he was terrified. He was desperate for his wife’s comfort but unable to seek it. He felt shockingly alone and fatally unmoored. No matter how far and fast he walked, his past was in hot pursuit, and any satisfactory future was punishingly out of reach.

He had reached a five-way intersection, vaguely familiar, and paused a moment before veering up one of the roads. Immediately he was assailed by the sweet, sweaty hay-and-hair smell of horses. He knew there was a racecourse in the area, and assumed there were stables nearby.

The smell brought a flush of an old happiness, and he slowed his pace better to capture the memory. It was twenty years ago — such a carefree time — and he, Sylvie, and eight-year-old Andrew were on holiday in the UK. For a week they had taken a furnished flat in London’s Primrose Hill, and every morning a troop from the Royal Horse Guards would clip-clop past. He would hear the horses long before they appeared at the corner, the hooves sounding crisp and percussive in the still, cold air. As they passed, and for minutes afterwards, there would be that sweet, grassy smell. There had been a groomsman too, who’d added extra spark to that trip. And now the same smell and a deep longing to return to those untroubled days.

He set off again at a pace. There was no point in hankering for the impossible. He might have AIDS, and he had to make a decision about the test. He should be grateful he’d got away with his parallel lives for so long. But he wasn’t grateful, and if it had been in his power, he would not have chosen to be this way at all.