Events in Iraq take him, with protesting Londoners, into the winter streets, denouncing all wars and the new empires that wage them. In the early evenings, if he escapes the library, he sometimes meets a colleague for a drink in the Senior Common Room or a small friendly pub nearby, which serves fish and chips at suppertime. He doesn’t go back to his empty flat until ten or eleven at night.

Marco hasn’t been back to London since that curtailed summer visit in 1982, but, after a gap of six years, Mehran had seen him twice, though very briefly, on visits to Rome in the late eighties. Marco had acted as if nothing had ever gone wrong between them, and had wanted Mehran to stay with him for a few nights. Mehran was friendly but busy, and once actually forgot to call Marco after promising to let him know if he could spend a day or two with him.

When he rings up from Rome to say he’s attending a conference on Iqbal and the Concept of the Self at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Mehran hasn’t seen or spoken to him for at least two years. Marco asks if he can stay. He arrives on a mild July evening and phones from a payphone near Mehran’s house. He got off at the wrong stop and lost his way. Mehran goes to meet him, finds him not far from the Regent’s Canal, near Lisson Grove. The sky is darkening, but Mehran sees Marco in the distance. He hasn’t changed much over the years, but something about his air makes Mehran understand more easily why people once found him plain and now call him handsome. His spare frame has filled out, he wears contact lenses, and his longish hair is brushed with grey; his once edgy manner is expansive, tactile. He dresses in baggy, elegant clothes that conceal his slight belly; he has travelled to places – Cambodia, Thailand, Bali – that seem only peripherally connected to the academic pursuits to which he is still dedicated. He had moved to Venice, married a Tamilian he’d once introduced Mehran to in Rome where she was living then with a musician friend of his; they have a daughter, but now seem to be involved in acrimony over property and custody.

‘I live like a hermit now,’ Marco says. ‘No money, no home, and half a job. How are you?’ But he seems comfortable, if not affluent; he still has that particular Italian rootedness that intrigues Mehran: roots in a country and a city he’s lived in most of his life, surrounded by faces he has known since his childhood; places – lakes, beaches, cemeteries, streets – he goes back to for solace; a native language he lives in, that inhabits him.

‘Well,’ Mehran says, ‘you know, quite well, all said and done. Reading around, in search of textual satisfaction. Work’s steady, that helps.’