Much of my attention during this time was devoted to working out the relationship between Francis and Jessica. I wanted to ask Michael, but I did not want to pay the price of his condescension. They exerted an easy air of ownership over one another, such as often characterizes the complacent love of beautiful young couples, each aware of the other’s desirability as well as their own, but they didn’t seem to sleep together. Though they were always touching and stroking in an absent-minded way, there never seemed to be anything definitely sexual in their contact. Nor, however, did I ever see them with anyone else, and I came to think of their physical closeness as a mode of exclusion, a warding spell against a lesser intimacy with someone else. Each in their way was a formidable guardian, and successfully warned off any outside attempts at sexual contact. If Jessica was standing at the long chrome slab of Tudor bar, and one of the college’s acknowledged male beauties finally worked up the courage to offer her a drink, Francis would appear, light and playful, and slip his hands over her bright blue eyes from behind, blindfolding her and saying, ‘Guess who?’ If a young girl sidled up to Francis at a party and asked him for a light or a cigarette, or said she had seen him box against Oxford, trouncing their middleweight champion, Jessica would appear at his shoulder and whisper something in his ear. I felt this exclusivity more keenly the closer we became. It was like a locked room in my own home.

Michael knew no such limits to his appetites, and the women who got too close were pulled into the black hole of his ego, where they would inevitably be squished. He was much further advanced in his seduction techniques than the rest of us, who still thought that sex was in some way linked to mutual affection. He understood that sex, like conversation, could be an interaction expressing any emotional relationship, from love to hate to plain indifference. Armed with this knowledge he would target a woman, insult her in public as often and as strongly as possible and then ask her out for dinner. When she refused he would break into her room and strew floral arrangements across her bed, commission men’s choirs to sing outside her windows and leave presents on the steps of her lecture halls until her curiosity got the better of her and she agreed to meet him. Often there would be two or three of these campaigns running simultaneously. The final stage usually took place in a London hotel, the Met or the Mandarin Oriental for choice, and immediately the deed was done he would call Francis from the bathroom, who would put him on speaker-phone, then describe the girl and her sexual preferences until we were all crying with guilty laughter. He had had a number of silver ring pendants made on private commission in Hatton Garden, and in the morning the whole performance would end with the solemn ceremony of placing one of these pendants around the girl’s head as a gift. He said it tickled him pink to think of the twenty or so women wandering around Cambridge wearing the same necklace, each believing they were unique, and whenever I caught a glimpse of one lying on the breast of a woman sitting at dinner or walking through the cloisters I felt a little thrill of appalled jealousy, and pictured her sitting astride the pale hirsute bulk of his stomach, still primly dressed. Michael liked classy, self-possessed women, and I was always struck by the contrast between the elegant fronts they presented to the world and the knowledge of how they had allowed themselves to be exploited.