‘To old times,’ she said, raising her tumbler. When she drank, she left the print of her mouth on the rim of the glass.

And then I knew the feeling – it was regret.

2

WHEN I FIRST arrived at Cambridge at the age of eighteen, my world fell apart into two hemispheres like a neatly halved melon. There were, it appeared to me, those who were talked about and those who were not. All I wanted in life was to be one of the former.

There are two striking things about this judgement, which appeared with the benefit of hindsight. The first is its inaccuracy. I believed fervently that a small group formed the centre of the conversational universe, a hub around which all news and interest must necessarily orbit. The majority continued with their own lives, formed their own relationships, made their own betrayals and alliances, but always lived in the shadow of these others, these elevated beings. In reality, university society was too large to be hierarchical in the same way that school had been, and too small to evolve the hierarchies of power and celebrity that emerge in the real world. The people who organized the parties and wrote the newspapers might have been elevated above the rest of the university, but the other students did not really care about the lives of their social superiors any more than the fish care about the birds. The second is how little it mattered what was being said. I didn’t care what the nature of a reputation might be, so long as it was a prominent one.

As to why I made this judgement, it is difficult to recall. I know that it appeared in the guise of a revelation, something so obvious and true that it obviated the need for rational questioning. I had not been a popular boy at Solhurst, a minor Catholic public school in Dorset, and I felt that popularity was the missing ingredient that would turn me from stodgy fare into a delicacy. I was reasonably good-looking, a natural sportsman, academically quick and hard-working, but I could not make friends, could not get laid, and had yet to find my own version of fun.