‘I’m really hungry,’ he continued, accompanying his words with that slightly simple smile and nod of the head, much favoured as a sign of shared artlessness and brotherhood by peace- and nature-loving peoples the world over.

I must confess to nursing a resistance to that sort of smile. I don’t like being dragged into brotherhood willy-nilly. Camilla, on the other hand, had no trouble with it. She was a patrician by nature but she got on well with the alternative culture and shared its interest in beans and rice. I had no doubt, for example, that she had found Tarquin in a pub, liked the look of him, bought him drinks all night, and finally invited him back, as her guest, to help himself to toast. It wasn’t a puzzle to me that he had called out what was altruistic in her. He had a sweet, lost face. Behind all the hair he had soft, brown eyes. I wanted to do something for him myself. But I wanted to do something to him more. Not for the first time in the company of someone who had studiedly turned himself into a waif, I felt a violent polarity of instincts in me: I was half Jesus Christ, wanting to give him food and shelter and unforgettably pithy advice, and I was half Raskolnikov, believing that to such a person, who seemed to hold himself of so little account in the world, I could – and should – do whatever I wanted.

It’s unlikely that he knew what I was thinking. He believed we were all brothers under the skin. But I hadn’t spoken to him yet and he must have thought I needed reassuring that he wasn’t a burglar. ‘Hey, it’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ve cleared it with your chick.’

I still didn’t say anything.

‘She is your chick, isn’t she?’

The idea of my Camilla as a chick, the idea that she could be seen in such a light by this hopeless hairy boy with patches on his jeans, affected me powerfully. It will save time and spare me some painful recollections if I say that I felt precisely as I had on that famous afternoon in Soho when that pillar of Sicilian respectability fingered my photographs of Sharon, scrutinizing them from this angle and from that. Now, as then, something old and sweet rose to the back of my throat. Now, as then, the solid ground of my passion – pride, possession, fondness, respect – fell away from under me. Chaos had come again to the life of the affections. Only this time – I was mature now, don’t forget – I knew what to do. I had a brown-eyed hungry visitor on my hands – fine. Above me a drunken banquet was laid out, going to waste. Also fine. I didn’t have to choose between being Jesus Christ or Raskolnikov, did I – I could be both.