‘Walker, yes?’ he panted, and, attesting to the ludicrously strong hold of manners on the English upper-middle classes, he stuck out his hand in greeting. He was still adjusting his corduroy trousers, which had been pulled down to the tops of his thighs by his passage through the window, revealing his boxer shorts. In the light from my anglepoise lamp I could make out thinning black hair and a rugby top smeared with black grime and lichen from the roof. He finished adjusting his trousers in a last deft heave. He stood with his feet firmly apart and his broad shoulders facing me squarely, taking possession of the room he had just entered through the window. I had been lying in bed without a shirt and, despite the fact that he was the intruder, he made me feel uncomfortably conscious of my bare chest. I resisted the temptation to cross my arms over my stomach and reached out to meet him in open handshake. Our eyes and palms met in unison, and I held his officious blue gaze as he covered my hand with dirt from the tiles. ‘Michael Findlay. I was two years above you at school. West House, class of ninety-eight. May I hide?’

His tone expressed both tolerance and mild indignation, as if anyone who knew how to behave would already have offered him a closet. We both cast our eyes around my room, the search given some urgency by the acceleration of the feet on the stairs in response to the thud of Findlay’s body on the floorboards. As a result of my relative isolation, I had begun in my first fortnight to dote on my room. As far as my budget would allow, I thought it exceptionally elegant. I had constructed the decor around a recurrent fantasy that had now been honed over many idle hours into a perfect model of desires fulfilled. In my daydream I was bringing a beautiful girl back from a very exclusive party and, as I turned on the lights in my room, a whole new world of insight into this charming stranger was revealed to her. The objects and furniture, carefully chosen and arranged, induced in her a long pre-coital swoon in which every detail raised her estimation of my virtues and abilities, tightening her desire until it shook with tension like a single string of a violin. The dusty prints above my bed (bought from Scope for their antique air and sober sepia colouration) indicated my maturity. I had invested a considerable portion of my student loan in Egyptian cotton sheets from Peter Jones, a fabric I had read about in an airport novel, which I felt had an air of sophisticated experience. The brass art deco lamp, the bottle of good Scotch, the books liberally arranged (and, in some cases, read) to express a whole spectrum of cultural interest, all had their story to tell. The most prized possession, the one most likely in the confines of my imagination to initiate the final swoon into my arms, was the easel complete with fresh canvas standing in the corner, where the light from the window lasted longest. The old mahogany bureau (part of the room’s original furnishings) was entirely taken up with a series of drawers, and the fitted cupboard in the corner by the door was quite small. The interior of the room had been tailored, however optimistically, to facilitate a seduction, and it was difficult to see how it could be used to harbour fugitives.