He held up the bottle. It was still two-thirds full. Enough, at a dab a night, to last him into his dotage, when perhaps the middle-aged Kurt, portly and balding, would push him around the apartment in a wicker Bath chair, and all his past life would have become like the events of a single afternoon, in which much had been done, but little, nothing at all perhaps, achieved. His did not underestimate his work, his hard-won craftsmanship, the pleasure it gave, but increasingly it felt like something he did in order to avoid doing something else, a forty-year displacement activity, and he wondered, leaning into the mirror to watch himself think, what the true currency of human success might be. Certainly it had nothing to do with prizes, reviews, his photograph in a newspaper – it was extraordinary what little difference such things made. Neither was it a matter of figures, like the number of francs you had, or happy days, or friends at your funeral. And love?

Loving, you would not die of utter loneliness like a dog at night in a field. But love was too arbitrary. It was mere good fortune. A cloudburst. Any number of base and useless people were capable of it. Hitler had loved his Eva. Stalin, too, must have loved somebody once. No. We needed to be weighed more carefully than that. So what better than those sudden tests of worth and courage for which there was no preparation other than your entire preceding life? Those moments when you must step forward from a line of silent faces and declare yourself; say yes when the others say no; run back into the burning house without the least hesitation. Or just ask a question, like little Sandor at school on Ulloi Ut, who stood up from his desk and asked the teacher why it was necessary for certain pages in the history books to be glued together. In such moments you could fail beyond your wildest dreams. Or succeed, of course. There was that too.

He touched the precious drop of scent on to his neck, tied his robe and left the bathroom, shuffling in Moroccan slippers along the corridor to the bedroom. He grinned to himself, lugubriously, at the thought of the Bath chair. The twilight of a passionate dilettante! It was not much to look forward to.