‘I thought two vulnerable people like Marvi and I could trust each other, give the other what each lacked. Now’, he tells Riccarda on New Year’s Day, in a Pont Street flat she’s rented for a season, ‘I don’t know what my worst mistake was: the trust, or the sharing of the lack.’

‘Have you thought of the fine line between love and kindness?’ Riccarda asks him. ‘You’re a kind person, one of the kindest I know, but kindness needs detachment, darling. And pity. Kindness is what you think that girl might need, and you’re most probably right, but you must also understand pity’s not what she wants. What’s more important to me: is she kind to you?’

Riccarda’s homes – the Roman apartment, the rented service flats in Chelsea and South Kensington – are his only refuge. To her love of Broadway musicals, Riccarda has added an obsession with fantasy films of every kind (she insists they are allegories): Star Wars, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Dune, Ladyhawk. They spend hours at the cinema, or watching videos. In Riccarda’s company, he pretends to forget Marvi. For a while.

April. During the Easter break, Mehran decides he wants to spend his thirty-fourth birthday in Rome, with Riccarda. But Marvi begins to weep: her birthday’s a day after his, she’s going to be thirty. Hasn’t he thought she would miss him, how much she’d need him? He delays his trip to the end of the month, stays on in London. The party, supposed to be a surprise, is arranged at a Polynesian restaurant in a Mayfair hotel. He arrives at 9.30 pm, in a suit, takes his place at the table she’s meant to be at, among her distant cousins. She isn’t there yet; he eats alone, with near-strangers. She appears at midnight. Dressed in transparent silver. With a couple of college friends in tow. They couldn’t get her to leave the bar where they stopped off on the way for a cocktail. She’s drunk.