She continued, and I felt from the way her eyes shifted that she was looking back into her own head, reading me a prepared speech off the walls of her sockets. ‘I’ve forgotten a lot of what happened. I’ve tried hard to forget, in fact. Before I read this, I had half convinced myself it was all a dream, a year-long dream from which I woke at graduation, and my adult life was my real life, my waking life. Now I need to make a risk assessment. Once I know what the risk is, I can begin to plan. But I’ve done such a good job of forgetting. I can’t . . .’ She laughed, apparently in frustration at having to make the admission. ‘I can’t do this on my own. I need your memories.’

She looked relieved, and I knew she had finally disgorged her real purpose. As the perpetual gloom of London in winter deepened into night proper, I felt a tremendous sense of isolation. The ticking of the pipes in the walls and the rush of water in the metal system sounded like cooling rock, as if the sun had disappeared from the sky, and heat was quietly seeping out of the earth. I felt the walls of my skull had expanded to the size of my room, and the two of us had climbed inside for warmth. It felt good to have someone else to share this loneliness, but terrible also, because she would have access to all the classified files, the old diaries, the scrapbooks and albums my ego had collected with the fervour of a devoted fan, and the extent of my obsession with the past would no longer be a secret. I felt sometimes as if my life had stopped at twenty, when Jessica said hers had begun. The subsequent period had been outwardly active; I had acquired all the concrete evidence of a life; the possessions and the CV of a professional man. But no tendrils of affection had grown out from me to embrace another mind. Instead, my thoughts and feelings had continually interrogated that year, trying to guess its purpose. I wanted to tell Jessica these thoughts, to draw comfort from her company, but without the hidden context of my life they would seem like embarrassing melodrama.

‘I’ll go through it all with you, if you like,’ I said evenly. ‘Do you want a drink? It’s Friday night, after all.’

Her scarlet lips blossomed suddenly into a broad smile. A minute crack split the make-up over her spot. I smelt her perfume, a delicate citrus scent mixed with the chemical tang of tobacco. The smell bypassed the border controls at the edge of consciousness, slipping right through with its illicit cargo of associations, and I felt a warm stirring in my groin.

‘Fine,’ she said.

I went back into the kitchen and poured us both a generous whisky. Whisky always tasted like memory to me.

I allowed myself a moment of self-abandon, like an old addict who finally disclaims his abstinence. I lifted my glass. ‘To Francis. He fucked us all in the end.’