The summer is dragging on, long and hot. My office in Victoria is high up and windowless, which is a bad combination. I have a fan, and am allowed to leave the door open, which is something. I sometimes think that all I have accomplished in leaving the Air Force is exchanging one set of filing cabinets for another – and then I remember Mervyn, and my stomach flips, and I have to bite the insides of my mouth to stop myself from grinning like an idiot.

He is not as happy as I am. Fame isn’t coming fast enough for his liking, although he’s doing everything in his power to meet it halfway. He’s built up quite a following in the physique magazines, thanks to my efforts and those of a few other photographers around London including, I am distressed to report, Gerald, who got him to pose in a leopard-skin slip that made him look very sleazy indeed. Others have done a better job, and Stephen put him on the cover of Muscle Boy, which earned him a ton of fan mail that Stephen diligently brings home at the end of every day. While we’re out at work, Mervyn trains at the gym, washes dishes in the café and dreams of stardom. We are together every night, on that single divan, except when the air is too hot and one of us retreats to the living room. Sometimes he is moody and distant, and I know then that I must tread carefully to avoid confrontation. For the most part, however, we jog along amicably, the three of us, in our strange ménage.

We sat one Saturday morning over our usual weekend breakfast of black coffee and cigarettes – because nobody had remembered to go to the shops for bread or eggs – while Stephen opened the post.

‘Oh my God!’

‘What is it?’ said Mervyn. ‘Cops caught up with you at last?’

‘Very funny, I don’t think. No. Look!’ He placed a printed card on the tablecloth, avoiding the spills and ash. ‘We’ve been invited.’

‘Who the fuck is Edward Templeton?’

‘Dearie me, don’t you know anything? Does the name Imperial mean anything to you?’

Mervyn shrugged, but it meant a great deal to me. ‘What, as in Imperial Studios?’ Theirs was the name on all the best physique photographs, those that graced the covers of Health and Strength, beautifully lit, artistically posed, a far cry from Gerald’s sleazy output.

‘The very same.’

‘Show me.’ Mervyn picked the invitation up, surveyed the thickness of the card, the gilt edges, the thick black ink of the printing. ‘Very classy.’

‘Classy? I should say it’s classy! People scratch each other’s eyes out for an invitation to one of Lady Templeton’s at-homes. My God! We’ve made it! We’ve really made it!’

Templeton lives in a large, stucco-fronted Regency house in Pimlico, ‘handy for the barracks’ according to Stephen, who is full of lurid tales of Edward Templeton’s taste for ‘rough trade’. It hasn’t rained for so long that the London streets smell of piss; here in Pimlico, everything is clean and fragrant. We walked from the bus stop in our best clothes, after a whole morning of fussing and grooming. ‘You look like a bloody civil servant, dear,’ complained Stephen, dressed for the occasion in a camp version of cricket whites. ‘Can’t I just …’