There were two weeks before the end of term. Exams were over, and the exhausted student body was gearing itself up for one last burst of hedonism, for the college balls and Suicide Sunday, the weekend of endless garden parties that marked the end of work and the beginning of play. Lisa was running her inevitable scam, trading tickets at inflated prices. The fact that her activities continued unabated following our deal, and that she poured almost as much energy into making a couple of hundred pounds as she had into making a million, confirmed something I had suspected about her character. Her goal was the accumulation, not the owning, of money or the advantages money could provide. She had a computer sciences postgraduate, with whom she had periodic arrangements, trying to see if he could forge the bar-codes and hologram seals on the Tudor tickets, which were already changing hands at a hundred pounds a go. I sold her my own tickets. White plastic marquees with chipboard dance floors began to appear on the sacred grass of the courts, springing up overnight like crops of giant fungi.

That summer, Francis said we should not see each other. He said we shouldn’t spend any of the money either. With his irresistible mixture of logic and fantasy he convinced us all it would be suspicious. We had to remain inconspicuous; we could not draw attention to ourselves. He conjured bogeymen, police and the Inland Revenue, college officials and Mafiosi, who patrolled the borders of our desire to spend. Lisa was his silent partner in this enterprise, and her sober nodding provided the perfect counterpoint to his impassioned pleas for self-control. This galled me a little, as I was sure that Francis would begin to fritter and Lisa to invest the moment term ended, but as the principle instigators and facilitators of the deal they seemed above reproach. In fact he was spending it already – every night he went out clubbing in a blizzard of coke, flooding his quickly assembled entourage with cheap champagne. When I asked him about these evenings, he would become evasive. I dodged and resisted, and they had to extract the promise not to touch the cash from my mouth like a rotten tooth. For the next few days I made gentle inquiries as to where Francis planned to spend the summer, and hinted as strongly as my pride would allow that he would be welcome at my house, that we could even spend just a little of our money on a place of our own if he wanted, or go on a holiday together. All my hints were lost in a fog of vague allusions – he said he was planning on going abroad, maybe to Ibiza where his friend was managing the V.I.P. at Pacha, maybe Mexico or to friends who were making an independent film in LA, but when I pushed for details he would just wave his hand and grin. Eventually, after a particularly embarrassing session sitting on the benches by the river at King’s, watching bare-chested men wrestling punts between the narrow walls of the Cam, his evasiveness threatened to turn into an awkward silence, and I stopped mentioning it altogether.