‘What?’

‘Old junk.’

The words clunk down on to the coffee table between us. Stephen takes a long drink, and looks out of the window. We both watch the lights of a plane traverse the sky from left to right, bound who knows where.

‘I suppose I seem terribly old to you, don’t I? No, don’t say anything. I remember what it’s like to be young. You don’t think about the past, and as for the future, it’s just the next drink, the next party, the next man. At least, it was for me.’

He sighs, and I try to picture him as a twenty-one-year-old.

‘Oh, don’t you worry, I had my fair share. More than my fair share, as my proctologist can testify. You keep on running, running, running, and then suddenly one day you wake up and you’re sixty years old and you’re on your own and you wonder what happened to all that fun and all that hope, all those fabulous nights, the outfits, the camping, all those friends you thought you’d have forever …’

He takes off his glasses and cleans the lenses. Without them, he looks less like a crazy old bird, more like a tired old man.

‘When you’re young, you look at old people and you wonder why they’re still breathing and walking around. You just think they are waiting to die. You think we’re the past. But I’m telling you, boy, we’re your future.’

He drinks up, and gets to his feet. He’s rather wobbly, and holds out a hand, which I grab to steady him.

‘I’m sorry, dear. I’ve been unforgivably rude. Thank you for not throwing me down the stairs. Michael said I did it deliberately, rubbing young men up the wrong way so that they’d treat me rough. And I must say, I did rather like it.’

He straightens himself, adjusts his collar in the hall mirror. ‘Oh, child, why didn’t you tell me I was looking like a mad old tramp!’

‘Now you really must let me go,’ he says when I open the flat door, loud enough for anyone to hear. ‘I’m sorry, but I simply will not let you have your wicked way with me. I’m old enough to be your mother!’

And he’s off down the stairs, cackling away, as he weaves into the night.

I wash up the glasses, rinse out the bottle and open the first of the boxes. It’s full of diaries. A glance at the spines: 1967, 1968, 1973, 1977. There must be about twenty of them. Twenty more in another box. More diaries, and letters and papers and certificates, in a third.

And in the fourth, the photographs.

Mervyn alone, Mervyn with friends. In the studio, posed under lights, with props – a sword, a spear, a classical column. In costume – a sailor’s hat, a biker’s cap, a kilt, a military tunic. In pouches and shorts and slips and briefs. On stage, posing and smiling, showing off his muscles, taking prizes, kissing girls. Outdoors by the sea, in the woods, in gardens and parks, always a pose and a smile, the hair thick and dark, the eyes laughing and sexy, the body … Oh, the body.