Coldharbour was a one-off. But the books that followed hadn’t been bad either. There were things, mantic moments, certainties, if you like, whole episodes that had blazed, hurt, been suffered for—and they were wasted. I had written them, I saw, for nobody but myself, who had never reread them. The conference had operated in the light of certain beliefs. One was that you can understand wholeness by tearing it into separate pieces. Another was that there is nothing new. The question to be asked when reading one book is, what other books does it come from? I will not say that this was a blinding light—indeed, what are academics to do?—but I did see what an economical way there was for me to write my next book. I did it there and then, living by the shores of Lake Trasimene. I did not need to invent, to dive, suffer, endure that obscurely necessary anguish in the pursuit of the—unreadable. There, hanging in the fringes of the Apennines, my ex-chum’s family history rendered invention irrelevant. So I wrote The Birds of Prey in next to no time, with no more than five per cent of myself—not the top five per cent either—sent it to my agent, together with some poste restante addresses, and drove off in a hire car.

Middle-age was leaving me and something more advanced was approaching and I didn’t much like the look of it. Memory, for example. Now and then it was patchy where it used to be good. I forgot my ex-chum with great rapidity and the book, The Birds of Prey, even faster. My friends had become acquaintances. Since no one writes letters any more, they soon ceased to be even that.

So I drove. In what must have been about two years—I think two years, but I’m bad at dates and times and ages, my own included—I learnt the main road system of Europe and further afield than that. I learnt the high roads, motorways, the autoroutes, autostradas, autobahns, autoputs from Finland to Cadiz. In the days when it was still possible I drove the whole coast of North Africa and a bit of the west. But mostly it was Europe. I hired cars. Now and then, if I needed to write, I bought a typewriter. I kept a journal in longhand but found if I leafed through it the thing was terribly boring and made me feel faintly sick. But I always kept it even if only one sentence for a day. It was a compulsion, like having to avoid the cracks between paving stones. The relatively cheap but also efficient milieu of the motorway in every country, its spiritual emptiness, its pretence of shifting you to another place while all the time keeping you motionless on the same concrete waste—that kind of internationalism became my way of life, my homeland if you like. I never achieved the very young girl of the lustful imagination and hardly missed her. “Time, unnoticed, did its dusty work.” There had been years when women had looked first then been told who I was. Now, on the rare occasions when I found myself socially among people, women were told who I was and looked afterwards. It was a curious repeat of or variation on the early years after my first book, Coldharbour, and before I met Liz. In those days I drove for two years in the States—Nabokov country, you might call it—selling my lectures on the academic merry-go-round. Later I drove in South America—well, never mind that. Now, however, it was Europe and extensions. I had a hobby, by the way, a hobby with no genesis, just like a book, the hunting of stained glass for no reason at all, just fun, nothing written down. I just like looking. I am in fact an authority on the stuff, though nobody knows so. I can date most glass to a decade, or at least defend my dating, though I’ve never tried. This eccentric enjoyment has turned me into something of a church fancier. You will have the darkest suspicions of me, what with Padre Pio and churches, but I have to make it plain that though I have spent many hours in, for example, Chartres cathedral, there is nothing religious about my interest in churches. It was art, the way of preventing light from entering a building when you don’t want it there. Also churches are most often dark, cool places and ideal for recovering from a hangover. I suppose I ought to mention that I drank a lot now and then and at least more than “some” most of the time;