My job granted one small mercy: the shifts, which most young men and women would have found punitive, helped to eat up the nighttime when I was most vulnerable to loneliness. The after-work movies took care of the small hours, which insomnia and isolation had taught me to dread. Sometimes I thought about the others, tried to imagine them distant and happy and imagining me. As the weeks went by with no contact, however, I reasoned they could not miss me as much as I missed them, and stopped. My father caught sight of Francis in the Daily Mail’s gossip column heading into Asprey’s with a blonde on his arm, the daughter of a shipping millionaire, and he left the paper by my door with a note that read: ‘Isn’t that your friend!? Very glamorous . . .’ He was spending the money, as I had known he would. This sense of abandonment poisoned the way I perceived our time together; even my happiest memories smacked of inauthenticity. It also added an extra flare of guilt to what I now saw had been a total neglect of my dad. I had simply taken our love for granted, and had barely spoken to him once during termtime. Grief had proved a great leveller for us; the support we had given each other in the months following my mother’s death had made us equals when I was still a child. At the age of twelve, when other boys were receiving orders and prohibitions from their fathers, I was getting advice and counsel. Away from the intoxicating influence of my Cambridge associates I realized how much I had abused this most important of friendships, but the fact of what I had done made it impossible to put right. If I’d tried to talk to him, to rekindle our intimacy, he would have immediately begun to ask me what was wrong, and I would either have had to confess, which was impossible, or lie, which would have made the effort insincere. Our respective work schedules kept us mercifully separate. Physical division foiled most of his attempts to reconnect with his son. At six o’clock after a night of cinema and porn I would be heading to bed as he woke for work, and I would already be out before he came home for supper. I tiptoed when I got in, and hid under the covers when he peeked blear-eyed into my room in the early morning to see if I was still awake. It was at these moments, when I hid away from his concern, that the temptation to tell him everything was almost unbearable. When I came home I would tidy his mess, and I would leave the breakfast things ready for him before going to bed. I moved around him in my twilight world like a ghost around a living loved one, equally unable to make contact or to let go entirely. That holiday laid the foundations for a creeping estrangement, a continental drift that continued for years, and which I failed to heal before his death.