It was only some obscure instinct that it would be better not to force the pace that prevented me from suggesting to Rowland Fitzpiers that we should all go up to look at Harrods garden furniture and that Sharon should lead the way. ‘Coffee?’ I suggested instead.

But even that accelerated things. ‘Good idea,’ said Fitzpiers, and looking straight at Sharon he added, ‘You lead, we’ll follow.’

Later, sitting over drinks – Fitzpiers drank strawberry milkshakes for some reason I couldn’t fathom – we discussed Fitzpiers’s career. He was doing less and less lecturing these days, he was pleased to say, and could very nearly see his way clear to doing none; he reckoned he had more than enough literary clout now to pick up sufficient reviews and articles and sundry commissions to support himself. It helped him, he was the first to admit, that his tastes were catholic. He loved westerns for example – the novels he meant, not the films, although he loved the films as well – and he had a contract in his pocket to edit an anthology of his favourites; he was mad on detective stories too, saw them as the most reliable pointers to social mores, and he was very keen on spy thrillers (the only genuinely political novels written), but his latest enthusiasm was for science fiction – if there was a future it was there.

‘My colleagues don’t exactly approve,’ he explained to Sharon. ‘Most of them think that literature is something that stops geographically at Dover (allowing for the odd day trip to Paris) and historically at Jane Austen.’

I looked guiltily into my coffee cup.

Sharon, though, screwed up her face in exquisite comprehension. She had taken off her fun-fur jacket. Underneath she wore a white cashmere cardigan. The contrast between the soft lamb-like wooliness of the garment and the parts of Sharon it contained had often brought the tears to my eyes. And it seemed to do the same to Fitzpiers. More than once, in his eagerness to talk and drink and not lose sight of Sharon, he had leaned forward to sip his milkshake and had impaled himself through the nose on the rainbow coloured straws. I marvelled at his willingness to take the pain rather than finish his sentences early. It was as a talker that I had most remembered him, certainly, but I had the feeling that he used to be rather more urbane, more physically composed, than he now appeared. Not that his clumsiness – he left bits of tissue sticking to his face, also, every time he wiped his mouth or dabbed at the mixture of blood and milkshake congealed in each nostril – looked like causing Sharon any distress. She even seemed to find it charming that there were tobacco stains on his front teeth, that he had grey hairs growing out of only one ear, and that his eyebrows met in the middle.