When I studied the pirated version, I laughed at the men who wrote and printed it, at their greed and the unimaginable arrogance of paraphrasing Shakespeare. When I tried in my last year at Cambridge to write about Francis, I felt like Marcellus. I was not a leading man. I was not on stage when the major events occurred. Much of what went on was wholly unknown to me. With the exception of the one memorable night at Corpus, I never saw Francis with his father. I missed him over the summer. I was not there when he, Jessica, Lisa and Michael were at the height of their friendship, and I was not there at his death. My own little lines, which I could remember with perfect accuracy, amounted to little more than exposition. I found that, in trying to capture his voice and the effortless grace of his presence, my attempts were as silly and inadequate as the bit-part player’s, though in my case there was no authoritative text to do him justice.

20

WHEN I WOKE, I felt the burden of the day press down on my chest. Just for a moment, I forgot the weekend and my guest. When I remembered, it was like the first day of the school holidays, when for a split second you think you have to get dressed into your uniform, and then suddenly realize you can lie in bed for as long as you like. I stretched and smiled. I could still hear Jessica’s breathing through the doorway. It was eleven-thirty – I had outpaced my alarm. Suddenly afraid that my office might try to reach me, I switched off my phone. It gave me a shock to see the dead face of the screen where there usually sat the bright little graphic of blue sky and the grey bars of the signal. Looking through the window into the square, I was amazed to see that the rain had turned to snow. I piled the duvet on top of my shoulders and swung my legs out of bed. I hadn’t really had a hangover in years, but I could feel the mess the whisky had left in my blood. I walked over to the window to look down into the road, and gazed out at the snow. A fine layer of powder had been reduced to slush in the streets, but was bravely settling on the scarred grass and the thin fingers of the trees. A group of children, their bodies puffed out like fat little men in layers of garishly coloured ski clothes, were having a fight with snowballs scraped off the hoods of the cars parked along the edge of the square. I could hear them shrieking with delight. A woman in black clothes was directing a small entourage of young men in the construction of an avant-garde snowman outside the White Cube gallery. The flat was warm and cosy, and as I stood above the heat streaming off the cast-iron radiator my breath misted the window. The sky was no longer grey but a brilliant, textureless white, a layer of cotton wool packing London up like a precious thing. I looked forward to sharing this day with Jessica. I decided we should wrap ourselves up like the children and head down to the South Bank, then spend the evening catching up properly in the warm belly of a pub I knew in Belgravia before an expensive dinner in the West End.