Jessica worked hard, and on the day her results were posted on the Senate House I watched from a vantage point in the Cambridge Bookshop for her to come and go, so I could see what she had got for myself. The results were due to be posted at four o’clock on a sunny afternoon in June. I stood by the door so I could see through the black iron railings that fenced off the stately enclosure from the street. Groups of students in shorts and T-shirts, trying to make small talk and drinking Coke, hung around the bright green lawn or leant against the warm white walls of the Senate House, where once the police had cornered us. The stones were cut from some kind of sedimentary rock, and when you looked up close you could see tiny white fossils trapped in the surface. Jessica was there with two girls I had never seen before, and a guy I recognized as a rowing blue from college. Her usual elegant pallor had been replaced by a healthy tan. I had seen the team sheets posted around college, and I knew she had taken up lacrosse. She looked happy. The man was huge, with amiable good looks. He had an aura of goodwill such as surrounds someone who has missed the point, and bases their contentment on a misunderstanding. We had laughed at him in the past. He would never have dared approach her when Francis was her guardian. When the results finally arrived, borne by a black-clad official, a hush spread over the group. Jessica hung back from the first wave of people crowding around the board, practising her trademark nonchalance, until the man began to laugh and pushed her playfully towards the steps. When she read the paper pinned to the wall she turned, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. I waited until she had gone, walked out and found that she had taken a first, as had Lisa, though by what means I could not tell. I arranged with the college authorities to change my room. I did not go to the graduation balls, and by the time I returned for my final year the last human traces of what had happened, Jessica, Michael, Lisa and Francis, had all been washed away, with a new set of young men and women arrived to take their places. As the few other students who had known them intimately left, they took their names with them.

Some time later, I tried to write about Francis, to summon him up on the page and stop him slipping away from me, but I gave up after a few fruitless weeks. There is a version of Hamlet called the bad quarto, which was the first to be printed, in 1603. It is a pirated edition, designed by an unknown bookseller to cheat Shakespeare of his royalties. To make it, the pirate hired one of the minor actors, the man who played Marcellus, to write out what he could remember of the play. In the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed, the actors were only given pieces of paper holding their own lines. They never possessed a complete copy of the script. As a consequence Marcellus’s largely irrelevant words are perfectly rendered, the speeches of other characters he shares scenes with are competent, and the rest of the play when he was not on stage is a garbled mess. It is a pointless jumble, the work of the finest mind in English literature filtered through the memory of a bit-part player, catching snatches in the wings, then scribbling them down months later in a scam by a venal London merchant. His ineptitude is funny only because we have the original to compare it to. In Marcellus’s version, Hamlet’s famous soliloquy begins: ‘To be, or not to be, Aye, there’s the point.’