Memory is a bad storyteller: it erases all the real twists in a tale. But when I look back it seems that all the narrative time allotted to Riccarda and me was nine days in August. Five – or was it four? – days of passion, of herself and those Roman hours, had been her spontaneous gift to me. After that her love became something she granted me, or loaned me, because I was importunate. Even when I remembered the days we had spent together, I could sense in early autumn what I hadn’t wanted to see in late summer: she had counted those days, day by day, and then she had counted each hour, as you might count out the notes for a loan of cash. That the loan might be one she was making to herself I did not stop to consider. All I felt was the burden of a gift too expensive to reciprocate. Or worse, the weight in my shirt pocket, chafing my breast, of a loan of notes and coins that couldn’t be repaid, only returned without interest.

We met, several times, often in public places, over the next few weeks. One night, after a showing of La Femme du Boulanger at the NFT, I refused to take her home when she said I should. In that no-man’s tract between summer and autumn, we walked up and down on a bridge over the Thames. I can see us clearly. She’s wearing a belted cream raincoat, like a man’s, and a beret; I’m in blue, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a purple sweater slung over my shoulders. But I can’t hear what I say: just a few cracked and headless sentences, about needing freedom, space to find my direction. And then I fall silent.

‘Talk to me, tell me,’ she says.

I respond: ‘But I thought I had.’

Let’s not meet till you come back from India.

I think it’s she who says that.

And I who want to say it.

A narrative of love, Riccarda’s and mine, that is fated to remain unfinished. I won’t attempt to give it closure here.

I arrived in Delhi on a November night. I had never been there before. I spent an hour in the queue before meeting Sabah and her husband Farhan, who had come to pick me up at the airport, at nearly three in the morning. On the drive home the air was heavy, foggy. The outskirts of the city were like countryside, and even in the darkness I could see the familiar dusty spaces and low-growing trees beneath which little groups of men with scarves tied around their heads sat around fires. We drove down a great avenue into the city. Tall silhouettes loomed at me from the darkness. Here and there, a fugitive lamp illuminated a reddish dome.