Looking back it seems incredible that any institution would ever let so casual a relationship exist between a multi-million-pound masterpiece and a student. At the time, however, I was surprised by the picture and not the arrangement. Cambridge University, and Tudor College in particular, had such a surplus of history that it was impossible to sustain a proper reverence. After all, we ran and washed and went to the toilet in the midst of buildings older than the countries of the tourists who came to see them. Daily contact with the treasures of the past inoculated the student body against wonder. Hundreds of generations of the great and good had left their legacy, both material and academic, and the offhand manner in which such things were handled was almost a point of pride among the faculty and staff. Scarcely a year went by when a dying alumnus did not divvy up his collection between his family and his alma mater. There seemed to be an idea that excessive awe and the fuss that went with it were a barrier to proper appreciation. I once opened a normal loan copy of Pound’s cantos in the University Library to find a handwritten dedication from the author to T. S. Eliot, to whom the book had obviously been given as a present. The library card was stuck to the opposite page. This is not to say that artefacts were abused – the university had the best facilities for storage and maintenance, and experts who loved the pieces and treated them accordingly. It did mean, however, that access to extraordinary objects for those lucky enough to be students was almost unprecedented, almost unregulated. It was actively encouraged by the staff, for what better way to inspire young minds than to immerse them directly in the atmosphere of their specialisms. Excessive practical barriers to this were considered to be in bad taste, and the sign of a philistine disposition. The Tudor Art Foundation was merely one symptom of this pervasive condition, and the college had perhaps twenty paintings of near or equivalent worth scattered around its buildings at that time, works by artists ranging from Stubbs to Rothko, each one the gift of a different benefactor. Anyone who marvelled at the fact marked themselves out as new to Cambridge, and quite unsophisticated in their thinking.

Francis laid the frame face up on the middle of his wooden coffee table. It sat slightly askew on a pile of old issues of GQ and an overflowing ashtray. I noticed that what I had first taken for fading of the picture was in fact a series of streaks of creamy residue on the surface of the glass. I thought he must have taken the picture down for me to have a closer look, and I gazed at it in awe. I had only ever seen such a thing before from behind the velvet rope of a museum or country house. I felt a sudden surge of importance as I welcomed it into my private life like a prized guest. As I traced the lines with my fingers Francis turned his attention to his bedside table. He took a small Chinese lacquer box from the bottom drawer and opened it. Inside there were a couple of oblongs of thick colourful paper, each one folded like a little display of origami so that the edges turned back into themselves, making a two-inch packet. Francis took out one of these packets, and it blossomed under his clever fingers into an open square in the centre of which was a mound of white powder. As it lay open I saw it was a part of a page cut from a pornographic magazine, with two girls lying one on top of the other on all fours, their raised buttocks concealed by white crystals, their shoulders and faces cut away at the side. It was not until he poured some of the powder on to the glass of the picture lying upturned on his coffee table that what he was doing connected with a wealth of images plundered from the movies, and I realized it was cocaine. My heart beat hard in anticipation.