Then Seville – the Triana district at 4 a.m. Footsore, irritable, hopelessly lost, wandering into a riverside bar to hear cante hondo, the crowd smoking as though in a trance, the singer, a middle-aged man in a dark suit at the far end of the bar, delivering his song in spasms of grief, ecstasies.

‘Next?’

Vienna. A melancholy hour at the grave of László’s mother, followed by a difficult, somewhat comical weekend with Kurt’s parents, kindly people only a few years older than László, who had addressed him during his entire stay as ‘Herr Professor’, preferring to think – could they really have believed it? – that his interest in their son was exclusively pedagogical.

And the holiday in New York with László’s brother, János, a divorced optometrist with an apartment full of prize-winning schnauzers. It had been Kurt’s first visit to America and they had driven from the airport in a yellow cab at dusk, rocking on bad roads through canyons of electrified tower blocks, Kurt almost in tears at the romance of so much light...

Evenings at the theatre. Nights on the town. Weekends in the country. Do you remember? A history with very few of the pages glued together, though each time they played the game, each occasion inspired by some unvoiced disquiet, the recollections were reworked a little as the line between memory and imagination became subtler, or just unimportant. It nearly always worked, and if not, well, there was the sambuca to make up the difference. This, thought László, was entirely the point of such drinks.

It was ten-thirty by the time he let his eyes open to the daylight. Kurt was long since up, the duvet on his side thrown back as if he had leaped from the bed. László slouched to the bathroom. He felt excited and slightly ill, his cock half erect, a persistent buzzing in his left ear, a taste of alcohol and fire on his tongue. He stood under the shower and coughed for a while, trying to clear his lungs, then shaved, catching the scrawn of his throat and emerging into the kitchen thirty minutes later with three scraps of toilet paper stuck to his skin by the adhesion of his own blood.