He returns to have tea with Judith in her cluttered kitchen. They should return to Hammersmith because this is Jomier’s weekend. Two sirloin steaks from the fancy butcher on Turnham Green Terrace are waiting in his fridge. So too aubergines, tomatoes, courgettes, garlic. Neither can face the drive through Saturday-night traffic. Judith rustles up some supper – pasta al pesto – wholemeal pasta, organic pesto. Afterwards Jomier looks in the Guardian Guide to see what is on TV. Under Siege 2 is showing on Five. Jomier hesitates to suggest it: he knows that Steven Seagal is not to Judith’s taste. Nor is Judith’s TV suited to major motion pictures: it is small and self-effacing, kept hidden under a table behind one of the sofas. She has no Sky+ Box or DVD recorder. She thinks TV is bad karma. But she knows that Jomier likes watching TV and is prepared to compromise. They settle down to a documentary about global warming on Channel 4.

The following Tuesday morning. Jomier is at his desk in his house in Hammersmith entering those passages in his journal that cover the middle years of his marriage to Tilly. They are dull. Trials, his attempts to become a QC, the children’s schooling, dinner parties, holidays, weekends. Are they dull because he was dull? Had he always been dull? He scrolls back to the earlier years – his adventures with Marco and Tom. He misses Marco. Marco had been caustic and funny and, with Marco, Jomier had been caustic and funny too. Had Jomier’s wit been a mere echo of Marco’s? Or did they laugh about life only because they were young? If Marco had not succumbed to his family’s exclusive disease, Frycht’s anaemia, would he have changed like Tom? Like Jomier? Become dull? A snob? Married a Habsburg? Dropped Jomier? Or would he have come out of the closet? Set up house with a gay lover in a loft in New York? Jomier will never know. Marco’s life is like an old paperback that has disintegrated – the glue dried out on the spine. The central sections are lost. Only the first chapters remain and the last page. Death ends not just what is but what might have been.