It took me thirty-six hours or more to get back to London; I travelled via Milan, changed stations at Paris, took the ferry at Calais. I cried on the boat and pretended I had hay fever in the sunny August weather. After Riccarda’s sudden flight I knew that our relationship would always be full of interruptions and breaks. I had always wanted to hold on to her, missed her while she was away and found her elusive, so I gambled my body for her love, thinking that once we were lovers I would have a bigger place in her heart. I had failed. Looking at the whitish waters of the Channel now, I was making other plans: dreaming, for the first time since 1979, the year I dreamed of going off to Shiraz or Isfahan to study Persian literature there once I had learned enough grammar from Lady L. Now, again, I wanted to travel, to write essays or poems, or a short film script, perhaps, to live for a while in another country. I thought I should write a doctoral thesis or at least go along with my tutor’s suggestion that I write one. Then I would settle down with someone and have a child, or adopt one, while I was still young. No room in my life for a secretive lover. I took the train from Dover to Victoria, and reached home dirty and dishevelled.

Riccarda came back to London in early October. We met in the lobby of the Hilton in Holland Park and were sipping coffee in the open-plan bar. Riccarda had ordered a cognac to go with her espresso. It was two in the afternoon. She was, again, the Riccarda I’d first met: perfectly groomed in her lightweight, dark-blue jacket and knee-baring skirt, her shoulder-length hair, unusually, pulled away from her face.

My father had given me an open ticket to India as a graduation present. I hadn’t been able to go back to India with my mother when my grandmother died, as I was in the middle of my exams, but the time, he said, seemed right, while I was in a transitional phase.

‘I’m going to India soon,’ I told Riccarda. And she, who was always weighing her wings to fly, seemed not to understand.

‘You’ll be meeting that vulgar Roman boy again, I suppose. Sounds like one of his plans. Shouldn’t you be looking for a job rather than exploring your roots?’

She could have been talking to her sulky adolescent son.