My own recovery took longer, delayed by the well-meaning refusal of almost everyone to refer to Miriam’s death. A gentle conspiracy existed among my friends and publishing acquaintances, as they feigned not to notice that Miriam had vanished through a window of time and space. This silence reminded me of the cruel childhood game in which we pretended, without telling him, that one of our friends no longer existed—the poor victim would be ignored, stared through, excluded from any games. I envied the elaborate mourning rituals of the Chinese, the public wailing of the widow on which Europeans so looked down. Watching the national mourning of a stricken America after the assassination of President Kennedy, I almost envied his bereaved wife. Every moment of her grief was endlessly replayed and anatomised on television. Her husband’s death, like the murder of his assassin, was recapitulated in slow motion, frame by numbered Zapruder frame. She wore her blood-spattered skirt like a cry of rage at the world that had widowed her.

*   *   *

One evening, after eleven months of unbroken celibacy, I was taken on a tour of Soho’s strip clubs by a London publisher then living in New York. The worst kind of Manhattanised Englishman, he wolfed down his sole and Chablis and then dragged me from one backstreet club to the next. At first I tried to slip away from him, but I was curious to see my own reactions. On minute boudoir stages the young strippers worked through their routines, smiling in their overlit way at the wanfaced men who packed the narrow seats. Caressing their breasts and buttocks, masturbating as they exposed their vulvas for a ritual few seconds, they mimicked the audience’s lust in routines as formalised as the aircraft emergency drills rehearsed by air hostesses in the minutes after takeoff. I waited for them to arouse me, but the strippers seemed to parade their sexual possibilities with all the fervour of anatomy demonstrators in a dissecting room taking their students through the urino-genital system.

“How long since you had a woman, Jim?” the publisher asked.

“A long time.”

“Well, come on, then. Cheer up.”

He told me that this tour of Soho clubs was our appetiser before we booked into an exclusive Westminster brothel he had been recommended by a British criminal whose memoirs he was editing. But I knew that he was too drunk to do more than go back to his hotel. Watching him as he gazed at a cobra-eyed teenager stroking her anus with a forefinger, I guessed that it was this stylisation of sex that most appealed to him, not the act itself. The atrocity exhibition was more stirring than the atrocity.

When I left him at the door of his taxi he put a heavy hand on my shoulder, searching for some insight into my sad condition.

“Perhaps, Jim, you just don’t like girls anymore…”

*   *   *