We moved from the sofa to the bedroom. Francis lifted Jessica off the sofa and carried her through as if she were a sleeping child. We made objects of our own bodies, and consumed them. We turned cannibal on our own conventions, because they were the last rules we had left to break. The three of us had been adrift for too long on a featureless ocean, starved of all limits, until we fell upon our own and devoured them. I never again in my life felt a pleasure so great that the physical present eclipsed everything: the past, the future, the personal, the moral, like the moon coming across the sun at midday, cloaking all the drab details of the city for a few moments in a delicate, sensuous half-night. After it was over we lay, the three of us a muscular knot of intertwined limbs, wound together like a length of rope, with Francis and me flanking Jessica. I saw in the candlelight how his black skin stood out against her white smooth body, and my own brown limbs, lightly covered in hair, interposed between them like the child of their two colours. Birdsong and morning traffic filtered through from the street, and the heavy curtains were mounted on a frame of sunlight. Her head was turned in towards his shoulder, and he looked into my eyes through the blonde veil of her hair, which shifted slowly with the pattern of his breath like seaweed underwater. The chemicals in my bloodstream imparted a goodbye kiss to the system, and I sank in the blissful warmth of living flesh. I knew then, as I know now, that perfection is the first point of decline.

15

WE LEFT THE hotel separately. Jessica had a day planned with her family, and I woke to find her gone. Francis was sleeping naked in the bed next to me. I hoped she might have left a note, some kind of clue to how she had felt about the previous night against which I could calibrate my own reaction, but there was nothing except the absence of her cosmetics in the bathroom and the space where her trousers had been discarded on the floor. Embarrassed by Francis’s nudity, I stayed out of the master bedroom. He was sprawled over the bed on his front, the sheet lying over his thighs, a pillow clasped under his cheek. The pale soles of his feet were turned up towards the ceiling. The smooth flesh I had so relished the night before I now found vaguely unsettling, like a succulent piece of steak I had taken into my mouth, chewed and then removed, placing it back on the edge of the plate. I put it down to the fact that my bloodstream was saturated with minor poisons, which made the beautiful summer day seem like a sun-faded photograph, dull and flat. I had a two o’clock meeting with my tutor in Cambridge to explain my recent absences from college. It was a requirement of the course that I spent a certain number of days a term in my room, and the porters had notified the authorities of my frequent trips to London. The previous day the obligation had felt absurd – I imagined myself as a general, returning in triumph to his home city to find his car had been clamped. That morning as I wandered around the suite collecting my scattered things I was almost grateful for the appointment, for a chore to anchor me back in normality. I did not wake Francis to say goodbye. We did not call each other that night, and as I lay awake in bed in my rooms in Tudor, my tutor’s condemnation still fresh in my ears, I realized it had been months since a whole day had gone by without the three of us speaking. When I closed my eyes I kept seeing the two of them moving together, her pale body straddling the taut cradle of his hips as I pinned her slender wrists behind her back, like a bright light burned into my retinas. I had to open my eyes again in the darkness to stop seeing them.