By the time Thursday arrived I was quite frantic.

In my first year Cambridge had still to adjust to its status as a wealthy London satellite, and the restaurants and bars that met Michael’s elevated standards tended to be of the old and uncomfortable order. Over the next three years expensive gastro-pubs and nightclub-restaurants with names that involved puns and random numbers (O2, 2 Much) sprang up, but that evening we had dinner in Browns. Browns was opposite the Fitzwilliam Museum on Trumpington Street. It was a large open-plan restaurant that looked like a hilltop club from the British Raj, with fluted columns supporting a lofty ceiling of moulded white plaster, wicker chairs around bamboo tables, and palm fronds emerging from bronze pots flanking every doorway. The floor was that of an ornate bathroom, with black and white tiles arranged in a chessboard design. Vast wooden fans paddled the lazy air around the skylights, turning like the wheels of old-fashioned steamers in calm water. The building had been a mental asylum before the Second World War, and there was still a vaguely recuperative air about the cocktail lounge, particularly on a Sunday morning when you could sit for hours with a newspaper mounted on a wooden handle, and a brusqueness to the staff which suggested regular dealings with a mentally deficient clientele. Michael was waiting for me at the bar, and when I came in he handed me my old jeans and green hoodie in a bag of thick card with the legend ‘Turnbull & Asser’ printed on the side. Later I would come to realize that he had returned the cheap clothes I had lent him, freshly laundered and pressed, in a shopping bag from one of the best bespoke tailors in London, but at the time his slight was too subtle for me, and went over my head.

That night Michael appeared fantastically grown up to me. He ordered his three courses with a certainty and exactness of pronunciation that spoke of generations of Findlays completely unable to prepare their own food, and a cavalier disregard for his own health or the health of his wallet. We talked in a desultory manner about school, about the fates of mutual acquaintances, and the boys in his year who had had brothers in mine. All the time, I was thinking about the four figures in the moonlight, wondering how I could introduce them. Teachers had retired or moved on; there had been a brief scandal over child pornography, delicately handled by the headmaster. Michael said that sports, morals and academics were in decline. At the end of the first course, a generous dollop of foie gras in a tiny ceramic ramekin, we had exhausted the little stash of natural conversation available, and I was able to steer the talk round to the night of our meeting.

He glanced to left and right, as if the college authorities might have tailed him to dinner. On one side was a raucous birthday party of second years arguing with the waiter about the set menu, and the table on the other side was empty, the white napkins standing in rows like a well-ordered campsite. Satisfied, he put his elbows on the table, bringing his chin over the centre of the cloth, and gestured for me to do likewise. Finally, he refilled my glass with the last of the Cabernet, and without looking up gestured to a passing waiter to bring a second bottle.