But the logic of the answer did not comfort László, and through the following weeks, as the streets acquired their strings of Christmas lights, and Kurt decorated the apartment with evergreen and wrote out greeting cards, László had found himself traversing the immense grey fields of depression. He slept for fourteen, fifteen hours at a stretch. He had sweating fits and panic attacks, a particularly nasty one in the Métro at Odéon, so that he had to be helped from the station by a kindly tourist. Alarmed, Kurt arranged an appointment with Dr Ourahm, a consultant at the Salpêtrière, and László allowed the good doctor to take his blood pressure and shine a light into every orifice and listen for a full minute to the stutter of his heart, and finally to present him with a bill for two hundred and fifty francs and a prescription for Prozac. László paid the bill but dropped the prescription into the first bin he came to on the boulevard de l'Hôpital. He did not believe that pills could ever be the cure for those moments when life entered you with a loss you can never be reconciled to. But for Kurt’s sake he had forced himself to get up in the mornings and sit a few hours at his desk, and by acting like a normal man, one who was neither overly cheerful nor dangerously unhappy, he had discovered a certain peace of mind, and even a certain optimism that had teased him with the thought that it wasn’t all over yet, that his life, even now – perhaps especially now – might catch him unawares and show him the gate into a garden he had never walked in before, and where, as in the conclusion of a really satisfying story, everything would suddenly be forgiven. It was absurd, of course, but still...

He heard the toilet flush and glanced at his watch. One-twenty. It was time to start his own preparations for bed, but the remaining candle, what was left of it, the flame teetering on the wick, seemed to mesmerize him, so that he did not hear Kurt, on light feet, cross the corridor and lean into the room and remain there a few moments, looking with tenderness and concern at his lover’s back, and listening to him interrogate the air with a name he had sighed in his sleep for months.

12

TB lived in a modest building with a fake stucco frontage opposite a Domino pizza store in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. In the porch, Larry was greeted by a plump, conservatively dressed American matron. She had recently had her hair done and it shone at the tips with the weird blue of a food colourant.

‘Oh my God!’ she cried. ‘Oh my God! It’s Dr Barry!’