We had enjoyed a similarly inconclusive exchange a couple of weeks earlier when Sharon had first proposed Harry Vilbert (who lived in a basement bedsitter around the corner and did odd jobs for us) as a change from the usual blank versifiers and quaint antiquarians she invited every other Friday to address small audiences in her bookshop by West Finchley tube station. Because of its proximity to the tube, and because she had been twenty-one in 1960, and because there already was a Jules et Jim selling kitchen co-ordinates three doors down, Sharon had called her shop Zazie’s dans le Metro. I had never been enthusiastic about the name, but then it was Sharon’s constant complaint, particularly in conversations with her mother, that I wasn’t enthusiastic about anything that I hadn’t myself initiated. Such as Harry Vilbert.

But in fairness to me I must say that it wasn’t because I hadn’t thought of him first that I didn’t want him. I have always had a strong aversion to people who want to swing pendulums before your eyes or tell you exactly how much change and how many sweets you’re carrying in your trouser pockets or claim that they’re receiving loving messages from your least favourite dead relation. The question of whether or not they’re shysters hardly enters into it; it’s the poor taste of their props and costumes that tells you all you need to know. The same irredeemable tawdriness that dogs stage magic dogs the spirit world. Materialism, I know, has its drawbacks, but disembodied souls lack the dignity even of the flesh. I have an unshakable conviction that human beings only approach divinity when they are upright, awake, a touch corpulent, and wholly sceptical. A God without a body is nothing but a trick of semantics.

This was why I was against Harry Vilbert. Not that he didn’t have a body. He did – if anything too much of a one for my liking. He was one of those slight, wiry, ageing men whose earthly tabernacles seem to take a long time receiving from the brain the appropriate messages as to quiescence and decay. There was a grey pallor of death upon him, and yet one could see that there was still spring in his flesh, still a greedy responsiveness to sensation at the very surface of his skin. And his speciality – apart from doing odd jobs around the shop for us and selling copper charms and bangles on the Portobello Road – was conducting out-of-the-body experiments. This was why I was against him. ‘Must we really have him?’ I objected. ‘Couldn’t you try Ted Hughes again?’

‘Too expensive for us. Anyway you poo-poohed him last time.’

‘Ted Hughes?’

‘Yes. You said you couldn’t take one more fucking poem about a pike.’