I go out for a walk along the river, on my own, kicking through the falling leaves and watching the children jumping in puddles, driving their mums mad, laughing and running away, giggling and wriggling as they let themselves get caught.

I go home, pour four bottles of vodka down the sink and flush my stash down the bog. I think about putting my flat on the market and moving out of London. I look on estate agents’ websites to see what sort of price it might fetch. I’d like to live in a cottage looking out to sea. I’d like to have a dog.

A letter arrives from Stephen. Michael is dead.

‘He passed away peacefully in his sleep,’ it says. ‘We had no warning, and he had not been ill. I think he was just in a hurry to join Mervyn.’

There are details of the funeral, but I really can’t take any more time off work. I write to Stephen, expressing my condolences, trying to suppress any hint of the relief that I’m ashamed to feel. The thought of trudging to and from Michael’s flat through the dismal outer London suburbs, watching him grow older and more needy, fills me with dismay. I can’t help it.

I’ve still got his boxes of stuff. I don’t know what to do with them. Obviously he won’t be wanting them back. Perhaps the family will ask for them, the ‘estate’. I can’t imagine they’re worth anything. And they are in the way here; Michael himself said that they would be. So he’d have understood why I’ve moved them out into the bin store. If anyone really wants them, they can come and get them.

Two weeks later, another letter from Stephen. A note – unsigned, no ‘Dear Robert’ or anything – it just says ‘He left this for you’. Enclosed is a blue envelope with my name on the front. It feels quite thick. I don’t have time to read it, I’m on my way to work, and I put it in the ‘important but boring’ box for later filing.

Nine

Mervyn and I are established in what we laughingly refer to as a ‘bachelor pad’ a little further up Queensway. ‘You want to watch just how far up Queensway you go,’ said Stephen when we left, dabbing his eye (which was perfectly dry). We have barely seen him in recent weeks, he’s out so much, ‘with candles at both ends’ as he puts it. He doesn’t talk much about his work any more, but there were strange callers in the middle of the night, whispered telephone conversations, the occasional unexplained black eye. We do not miss any of this.

It’s a nice flat, large, airy and furnished, with a porter and a lift and hot water on demand and access to a roof garden. It has two bedrooms, only one of which we use unless, for appearances’ sake, we are obliged at least to ruffle the sheets in the other. Or unless we have had a disagreement. There have been a few, mostly relating to Mervyn’s much-publicised friendship with up-and-coming screen siren Maxine Trent, to whose well-upholstered wagon he has hitched his star. Edward Templeton says they will be the British Mickey and Jayne. Stephen says, ‘Mickey and Minnie, more like,’ in reference to Miss Trent’s squeaky voice, which is overdubbed when she is lucky enough to get a speaking role. So far she has appeared in a handful of movies for Rank, mostly in party scenes, as a barmaid in one (‘Gin and lemon, dear?’) and as a gangster’s girlfriend in another. Templeton plans to launch them both in a boxing picture, a sort of British Somebody Up There Likes Me, which has already been through a dozen different titles – Seconds Out!, Put ’em Up! And endless variations involving the world ‘ring’ – and as many scriptwriters. Mervyn is already focusing on the gala opening, the Leicester Square marquee with his name in lights, the dinner jackets and furs and diamonds, and Maxine Trent on his arm.