‘You drop me when she beckons,’ he complained when I told him I couldn’t see him on a Friday evening because she’d invited me to a family dinner. ‘She’s too old for you, you know.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

‘Well, you know what people think; everyone gossips about the two of you. By the way, what happened to Tina? Did she dump you? I saw her with an older guy at the cinema. He looked rich. She said I should call her, though.’

But with Riccarda I allowed myself reactions I rarely had before. If I didn’t hear from her for a week, I would miss her. When once she left me standing at her door for an hour in the rain and explained she had been busy shopping for porcelain with visiting friends, I retorted: ‘If you’re always so caught up with foreign visitors, what’s the point of making appointments with me, or having friends in London? We might as well be living in different cities.’

She was startled: I had never spoken so sharply to her.

At times I felt guilty for constantly keeping Marco on standby, though his own offhand manner was a great protection. If I cancelled a meeting, he too had to study, and wouldn’t have made it; if I rang him on the off-chance, something he had planned had just fallen through and he was free. Once I found myself with a spare ticket I had saved for weeks to buy, for a Juliette Greco concert, for Riccarda: she had said, at the last minute, she couldn’t come. I hadn’t seen Marco that day, and I left a note in his pigeonhole saying I’d wait at the Embankment till 6.40 pm, a little before the concert began at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. He was waiting on the embankment when I got there. ‘Just so you wouldn’t have to sit through it alone.’ I didn’t, though he offered, take the money for the ticket from him.

A couple of times, if he didn’t pick up the phone when I had promised to call and was late, I was vaguely disappointed. But he spent at least one weekday and almost every Friday evening at my house, and some Sunday afternoons at the cinema with me; I felt it was only fair that he should have some other interests apart from his classes at university, the swimming pool at the students’ union, and the fortnightly weekends he spent in Berkshire with Caroline’s family.