Whether it was the influence of Ralph, or the luminous, almost supernatural quality that the night seemed to have, I couldn’t help noticing how well groomed everyone seemed, particularly the pierced, tattooed young men, as decorated as a jeweler’s window, with their hair dyed in contrasting colors. Apart from the gym, these boys must have kept fit twisting and untwisting numerous jars, tubs, and bottles. They dressed to show off their bodies rather than their clothes.

One of the pleasures of being a man has been that of watching women dress and undress, paint and unpaint. When it comes to their bodies, women believe they’re wearing the inside on the outside. However, the scale of the upkeep, the shop scouring and forethought, the possibilities of judgment, criticism, and sartorial inaccuracy as, in contrast, the man splashes water on his face and steps without fear into whatever he can find at the end of the bed and then out into the street, have never been enviable to me.

When Ralph returned and I busied myself eating and looking, he praised my work with enthusiasm and, more important, with extensive knowledge, even of its obscurer aspects. He’d seen the films I’d written and many productions of my numerous plays. He’d read my essays, reviews, and recently published memoirs, Too Late. (What a dismal business that final addition and subtraction had been, like writing an interminable will, and nothing to be done about any of it, except to turn and torture it in the hope of a more favorable outlook.) He knew my work well; it seemed to have meant a lot to him. Praise can be a trial; I endured it.

I was about to go to the trouble of standing up to fetch more food when Ralph mentioned an actor who’d played a small part in one of my plays in the early 1970s, and had died of leukemia soon after.

“Extraordinary actor,” he said. “With a melancholy we all identified with.”

“He was a good friend,” I said. “But you wouldn’t remember his performance.”

“But I do.”

“How old were you, four?”

“I was right there. In the stalls. I always had the best seats.”

I studied his face as best I could in the available light. There was no doubt that he was in his early twenties.

“You must be mistaken,” I said. “Is it what you heard? I’ve been spending time with a friend, someone I consider Britain’s finest postwar director. Where is his work now? There can be no record of how it felt to watch a particular production. Even a film of it will yield no idea of the atmosphere, the size, the feeling of the work. Mind you,” I added, “there are plenty of directors who’d admit that that was a mercy.”

He interrupted. “I was there, and I wasn’t a kid. Adam, do you have a little more time?”