Except that often he doesn’t just fade away into nothing, as he might have hoped. The worst parts of him are kept hideously alive, simplified and distilled in a thousand feminine retellings, until at last he emerges as a creature of malevolent energy or pitiable confusion: the bastard or the useless man who just can’t get himself together. Although they were really the same person, I always preferred to inhabit the latter character.

For a long time, I never thought that much about the girls I had been out with. But after I fell for Eve, I felt sorry for all the unhappiness I had caused them. I hadn’t really understood it before, but I did now. If she wasn’t at work, for some unexpected reason, my day clouded over. If I saw her laughing too long with a flirtatious customer, I was seized with pain. Was this what they had been feeling about me, as I lay listening to the phone ringing and deliberating over whether to bother picking it up or not? Was this love, then, this busy, hungry rat let loose in my chest? If so, it was unbearable. Suddenly, I was on the other side of the thick pane of glass, watching her working and talking, and wondering if she had ever really noticed me.

If I woke up early, I took advantage of the extra time to do nothing but lie in bed and think about her. I thought about the obvious, of course, but that wasn’t all. I wanted to run the flat of my hands all over her and feel exactly how she fitted together, to trace the line of her vertebrae with my finger and take account of each small bump. I wanted to cook her dinner and for her to fall asleep later on the sofa in the crook of my arm. When I caught myself yearning for things like that, I knew I was in trouble, because if nothing happened between us now after all, I might be hounded for ever by a sense of loss.

One day, I asked her if she wanted to come and see a film. I tried to make it sound casual, as if I could have easily asked anyone at Delauncey’s, but she just happened to be standing there when the thought occurred. She looked surprised: what sort of film? An arthouse French film, I said, about a man who dreams of becoming a famous architect but who is locked up in an asylum by his scheming relatives, where he builds scale models of the world’s most famous buildings from empty medicine bottles and packets of drugs. It sounded pretty dreadful, she said. I thought it did too, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

‘There’s probably a bit more to it than that,’ I said. ‘Come on and see it, it’s got great reviews.’