Finally, stashed at the very bottom of the box, was an American girlie magazine from June 1977, Miss Valley Forge on the cover in a stars-and-stripes bikini and Davy Crockett hat. Inside – the month’s theme was American revolutionary ardour – other models pouted beside cannon or reclined on couches wearing only tricorn hats, or leered obediently from the froth of a Jacuzzi with a provocatively handled flintlock. All sexual promise had leached away from the images, as though they were time sensitive. The models, with their huge roseate breasts, looked as if they belonged to a super-race of wet nurses. All that was missing were the babies themselves, who should have been glimpsed in the background, crawling blindly over the basques and boas. It was hard to believe that these women, now perhaps winning glamorous grandmother competitions in Amarillo or Grand Rapids, had been among the cast of his adolescent fantasies. Their nudity roused no appetite in him now, but they reminded him – as almost everything did – that he had not had sex for eleven months, and that the last occasion, with Tatania Osgood, a girl who had slept with almost everyone he knew, had been so wretched it could never be spoken of, too bleak even to be converted into one of those humorously self-deprecating narratives of sexual failure that might have seemed, in certain company, endearing and funny. Fragments of the evening, a series of tableaux, adhered in his memory with a kind of malicious clarity. Tatania at the street door of his flat in Streatham holding a supermarket carrier bag containing two bottles of a wine called Tiger Milk. Tatania on the sofa of his little book-strewn sitting room, braless in a tight black dress and exuding a wantonness that was genuinely sad. Himself at 2 a.m. kissing her and trapping his fingers in the gusseting of her tights. The pair of them on the bed, she in tears as he tried to comfort her for a succession of cheating boyfriends. Then the act itself, a pleasureless dry wrestling, Mr Bequa’s TV jabbering away in the next room. And when at last the soft hammer of drink had sent her reeling into sleep, he had lain beside her listening to the thick of her breath, and thinking how the evening’s meanness and failure were part of a much larger failure, and that this was the price of his timidity; that he had earned such a night and would earn others by never having the courage to ask for anything better. He had had the urge then – still associated in his mind with the dawn tinkling of milk floats – to commit some act that would close the road behind him for ever, some extravagance of love, or something violent perhaps, murderous.