He had an account number into which we were supposed to transfer the three million. The debt had gathered speed faster than the interest being paid into our accounts, but his creditors indicated they were willing to take what we had and write off the remaining thousands. We knew Francis too well to believe that the account number was real, so there was a delay of two days whilst they sent a letter of confirmation to Jessica. The message came on a piece of paper with a letterhead, a property company with a London business address, and it was coded as a request for payment on building supplies. It bore the legend ‘Final demand’ in red at the top. With this confirmation, we made the transfer of funds. We skimmed off five grand to last us the rest of the term. We considered taking more, but decided against it. The bankers asked no questions, just as Lisa had said in her notes. After we had completed the transaction, we waited for some signal that the money had been received, but nothing happened. The three of us were holed up in Francis’s room watching movies on Jessica’s laptop. Whenever we ran out of films, one of us would walk to Borders and buy a couple more disks. We watched thrillers, horrors, comedies and teen flicks, but no gangster movies and no romantic comedies. We binged on entertainment for seventy-two hours, trying to keep the lights in the cinema down, and in all that time I successfully thought about nothing. By the end of the first week, we took our creditors’ silence for acceptance. Lisa had at last cut us off from her services in accordance with the terms of our deal, and as the danger cleared I realized I had the first draft of a seven-thousand-word dissertation on A. E. Housman, an author whom I had never read, to hand in before the end of term, and no idea where to start. I had effectively skipped a whole year of study, and I was missing basic skills that my contemporaries had mastered. For Jessica, who had entered her final year, the problems were even greater. I took care not to ask Francis about the future of his studies. I returned to the college library, which was only a hundred yards from his room, and prepared to start working. I eased my mind down into this simple disaster like a battered body into a bath of warm, scented water. The librarian smiled at me and asked me if I had been away on exchange. My old life, the one that predated Michael’s entrance through my window, was waiting to enfold me in thick obscurity. The battle seemed to be over.

We continued to see each other almost every day as the Michaelmas term drew to a close; Jessica and I met for lunch at the University Library, and Francis would come and have coffee with us in the afternoons. These conversations were cordial, and that fact alone should have frightened us – the things that needed to be said, the apologies and pledges, were too large, and so rather than take them on we fell back on empty civility. The canteen at the library was full of students and research fellows servicing their bodies after hours of solitary study, cracking their backs and blinking with surprise to find themselves back in the twenty-first century, and I liked the restful air. One tutor was there every day in a pair of cords held up with baler twine and sporting a wild beard, and he set the tone for the place; total abandonment of the self was sanctioned in the pursuit of knowledge. I wanted to lose myself, and Jessica and I talked mostly about our work. Both of us, I think, sensed that the exhausted peace we were experiencing was not shared by Francis, but we had no energy to investigate further.