David and I had seen less of each other in recent years. I liked him for his disruptive spirit and offhand charm, and his fondness towards the children—Henry’s entire passion for aircraft had been carefully instilled by David, who spent endless afternoons driving him to remote light-airfields. But David had taken Miriam’s death badly—far from forgetting her, he felt her loss more strongly as time passed. Sometimes he looked at me as if he thought that I was responsible for her death and that he alone was keeping her memory alive. A week before the Fair Oaks air show he came up to me in a Soho restaurant, where I was having lunch with an American journalist, and stood silently by our table, ignoring my invitation to join us. While the waiters brushed past him he stared into my face, at last recognising me for what I was. I wondered if he was going to hit me, but he touched my shoulder without speaking and walked back to his friends.

Outwardly he was still the wise older brother, understanding my entire character and motives. He had never read anything of mine, saying that there was no need to—we had already lived through the most important story inside my head. His sense of humour had become more eccentric, almost mimicking the Surrealists I admired so much. The increasing numbers of Japanese tourists who visited London he regarded as a conscious attempt to provoke him. Giving me a lift back from the premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey (“… a Pan-Am instructional film for space hostesses” was his comment), he stopped his Jaguar in Belgrave Square and smilingly watched one of the high stucco houses. I assumed that he had tracked down the home address of a favourite TV comedian, but as it happened this was the Japanese Embassy. When some luckless attaché emerged, probably on the way to a British Council seminar on cultural relations between our countries, David raced the engine and hurled the Jaguar at the elderly Japanese, almost throwing him across the bonnet. To David this had been a lighthearted joke, which would have lost none of its point if he had killed the man. “I have to remind myself of Shanghai,” he shouted as we cornered through Knightsbridge at speed. “I’m starting to forget it … the damn thing is, there’s nothing else to remember.”