‘Do you see anyone at all? From college?’ she asked, peering out of the window with a deliberate nonchalance that roused my suspicion.

‘No.’

‘I’ve come across them once or twice over the years.’

‘How is Michael?’

‘Don’t you read the papers?’

‘I read the Business section.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Mountaineering? Sailing?’

‘Testicular cancer. He has his own foundation now.’

‘How about Lisa?’

She smiled. ‘I’m sure Lisa’s fine.’

She looked around the room, searching for something. ‘Do you still paint?’ she asked. She had been looking for an easel.

‘No. Did you come back to discuss our contemporaries?’ I said it more sharply than I had intended.

Jessica cocked her head and scrutinized me, trying to decide whether or not she had been slighted. ‘No,’ she said in a measured tone, ‘I didn’t come to see you to reminisce. Or rather I did, but not pointlessly. We’ve got a problem, and I thought I should warn you. In case there’s something you can do to protect yourself.’

There was more than a hint of posturing in this statement, and she larded her motives with altruism to reproach me for my rudeness. Nevertheless, her words induced a brief wave of nausea, of old fear rising like bubbles through a thick liquid. ‘What problem?’ I asked, keeping my breathing under control.

She popped the catches on her briefcase and removed a folded newspaper from the neat beige interior (the leather was so pristine that I suspected the briefcase was a prop). It was a copy of the Telegraph, dated four days previously. ‘It took me a little while to track you down,’ she said by way of explanation.

I did not have to read the article to get the gist. I felt faint. The headline was enough to release all my fears. My head spun. ‘Dire Financial Straits at Oxbridge College’ read the banner in thick black type.

I wanted to throw the paper away, as if not being able to read it would make it untrue, but read on compulsively. There was a satisfying finality in seeing my nightmares resolved in black and white. Tudor College, Cambridge, after a series of extremely poor investments, was hoping to cover a five-million-pound black hole in its budget by selling off a couple of pictures from its permanent collection.

Jessica stood silently whilst I read. It occurred to me I should be relatively grateful to her, for bringing the news to me like this. I tried to picture the scene where she, sitting at the breakfast table before work, perhaps with her partner or flatmate, had turned the pages, and come with no warning upon the article. It would have shoved the orbit of her life aside, with the sudden force of the policeman’s knock late in the night when your loved one should have been home.

‘How long would we get?’ she asked, perching on the back of the chair with her long legs lightly crossed and her arms folded across her midriff.