University hadn’t been the haven I imagined, or not for long; much of what I learnt about the poetry I was looking at I acquired on my own. But it had provided me with texts and contexts, kept me safe in the closed circle of my studies and given me an introduction to Riccarda. And I had an idea now of where to go. My tutors had my apprenticeship planned. A PhD in the unexplored literary genre of the nineteenth-century Muharram elegy. And then, perhaps, tenure. I thought I was protected for the next three years. Yet in the darkening winter days, during Riccarda’s longer absences, I no longer had the consolation of Marco’s company.

But whenever Riccarda was in town I discovered a city I had hardly charted, hidden within the London I thought I knew well. My first taste of sushi in a wooden bar in Covent Garden. Sian Phillips singing ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ in the West End revival of Pal Joey. Pasolini’s Medea at the art house cinema in Brunswick Square. The Impressionists at the Tate, the Contemporary Dance Theatre at The Place in Euston. And I took her to hear Leonard Cohen sing, and see a new Pakistani film, The Blood of Hussein, which combined the poetry of Shia mourning rituals with protest against a dictatorial regime.

Riccarda’s habitat, I knew by now, was an elegantly constructed paper house: her relationships with her husband and son were of paper too, exquisitely patterned but fragile. I wouldn’t ever have asked, but her behaviour at the club confirmed what I had already guessed. (She also told me, in a reversal of our former roles of confessor and confidant, that she’d stopped seeing her photographer, who had been both her mentor and her lover: she said she probably only imagined that he ever loved her.)

In April, she took me out to celebrate my twenty-sixth birthday at Mr Chow’s in Knightsbridge. (O cuore! Congedati, e vivi!* she wrote on the flyleaf of the copy of Pavese’s diaries, The Business of Living, she gave me as a present.) I told her over candles and champagne that I had loved her for a long time without even knowing that I did.

I have a photograph of that evening. She’s dressed in a blue outfit she bought in India, a long, clinging shirt over narrow trousers. Her blue eyes smile at the camera. I’m dressed in white; I’m grinning into my glass.

The rest takes place off the page.