There wouldn’t be much more I could get out of Ralph. I had to live with the consequences of what I’d done. Except that I had no idea what those consequences might turn out to be.

Ralph said, “You will come and see me as Hamlet?”

“Only if you come and see me as Don Giovanni.”

“Yeah? Is that what you’re going to do? I can see you as the Don. Got laid yet?”

“No.” He gave me my new passport and driving license. “Listen, Ralph,” I said as we parted. “I need you to know I’m grateful for this opportunity. Nothing quite so odd has ever happened to me before.”

“Good,” he said. “Now go and have a walk and calm down.”

I was, I noticed, becoming used to my body; I was even relaxing in it now. My long strides, the feel of my hands and face, seemed natural. I was beginning to stop expecting a different, slower response from my limbs.

There was something else.

For the first time in years, my body felt sensual and full of intense yearning; I was inhabited by a warm, inner fire, which nonetheless reached out to others—to anyone, almost. I had forgotten how inexorable and indiscriminate desire can be. Whether it was the previous inhabitant of this flesh, or youth itself, it was a pleasure that overtook and choked me.

From the start of our marriage I had decided to be faithful to Margot, without, of course, having enough idea of the difficulty. It is probably false that knowing is countererotic and the mundane designed to kill desire. Desire can find the smallest gap, and it is a hell to live in close proximity to and enforced celibacy with someone you want and with whom contact, when it occurs, is of an intimacy to which one has always been addicted. I learned that sexual happiness of the sort I’d envisaged, a constant and deep satisfaction—the romantic fantasy we’re hypnotized by—was as impossible as the idea that you could secure everything you wanted from one person. But the alternative—lovers, mistresses, whores, lying—seemed too destructive, too unpredictable. The overcoming of bitterness and resentment, as well as sexual envy of the young, took as much maturity as I could muster, as did the realization that you have to find happiness in spite of life. I became a serial substituter: property, children, work, raking the garden leaves kept the rage of failure at bay. Illness, too, was helpful. I became so phobic of others I couldn’t even have a stranger cut my hair. My daughter would do it. This is how I survived my life and mind without murdering anyone. Enough! It was not enough.