Jomier did not follow his friend’s example. He was too fastidious. His curiosity had its limits. Nor could he be as cavalier as Marco. ‘You must always sleep with a woman at least twice. Once is insulting.’ Marco moved in without promises and moved on without recrimination. With Marco there were no false expectations: a woman always knew where she stood. He wanted sex, not love. So, it appeared, did some women. But Jomier wanted love. He knew the feeling of animal exultation followed a one-night stand, but then came the backwash – shame – a feeling unknown to Marco. Shame not at the sin – Jomier did not see sex as a sin – but shame at the post-coital repugnance – as powerful as the desire he had felt the night before. ‘This is not flesh of my flesh or bone of my bone.’ He never wanted to see Daphne or Daisy or Susie again.

Jomier always had, in his mind’s eye, a girl who would love him and him alone. He would not be one among others – a bloke to tether once the body clock reached five to menopause and it was time to settle down. She would be dignified, modest, chaste – her body held in reserve for a lifelong love. Even as Jomier snogged and groped and shagged, this imaginary maiden stood in a niche in his psyche, smiling sadly down at his heaving buttocks, like the statue of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.

Jomier had found her. The imaginary maiden had come to life. Tilly. Tilly 1. Marco had liked her. Tilly had liked Marco. She found him amusing. Marco and his escapades. But now that Jomier was one half of a couple, he could no longer hunt with Marco or even talk about the chase. A line had been drawn. So what had they talked about? Jomier toggles back through his digitalised journals. Politics. Theatre. Food. Travel. Books. Even here they followed different paths. Jomier read Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Powell and Angus Wilson; Marco read Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Jomier read the Spectator; Marco the Evergreen Review. Every summer, Jomier and Tilly spent two weeks with other married friends in a rented villa in France or Italy while Marco set off to some part of the world he had never seen – Patagonia, the Atlas Mountains, Lake Van, Damascus, Kashmir. He slept on mud-packed floors in Cambodia and ate guinea pig in Peru. For six months he lived in New York, fighting Norman Mailer in a loft over a woman and going to bed with a man. ‘It was vile,’ he wrote to Jomier, ‘but you have to try everything once.’