Later, as Riccarda was driving us back, she said: ‘I don’t quite know how to get to Bloomsbury, Marco. I’ll drop you both off at Mehran’s.’ Mmm, Marco grunted. In fact, she dropped us off a block away from where I lived, and Marco, rather than stopping for the night bus, followed me home. I went to bed almost as soon as we got home – I didn’t have a head for spirits, had knocked back a couple of whiskys at the nightclub, and must have fallen asleep while he was washing. I woke in the middle of the night from a deep sleep to feel something weighing on my heart, only to find it was Marco’s hand. He was recumbent next to me, in his shirt and his grey suit trousers and shoes still on, on my narrow bed, snoring softly, his head on my shoulder. I didn’t move, thinking of the double vodkas Riccarda had plied him with, but at some point, half-asleep, I watched him rise, stretch, look around him, pick up his jacket from the floor, strip down to his vest and briefs and lie down by the wall where I had left his usual quilt for him before I went to bed.

In December – a fortnight after that encounter – Marco left London for the Christmas holidays. He didn’t return. There was a complicated administrative reason. He was registered at the University of Rome (or Naples, I never quite understood). It was there that he would have to write and submit his dissertation. He hadn’t explained any of this to me when he left. He just rang up from Frascati on New Year’s Day; asked me to redeem his collection of matchboxes from his hostel near Brunswick Square, and to get a refund for his library ticket, which he had also left in his room. It didn’t occur to me that he had intended to be back; I only thought he’d been furtive about his plans, or at best careless, and he hadn’t said goodbye.

* ‘Look at me to your heart’s content / no one returns from the dead’

1981