But he knew it was pointless, and this sense of pointlessness made its way into his voice, enfeebling what should have been a heartfelt request, so that Claire was perhaps justified in looking at him as scornfully as she did, and saying, he thought quite nastily, ‘Why would I want to do that?’

She’d left, early, in her clumpy boots and a shirt he’d never seen before, the same colour as the notebook’s cover. He’d almost commented on the match, then caught himself, then caught himself again – what did it matter? She’d never hidden the notebook’s existence from him. She knew he’d seen it in her hands. But by then it had been too late: the latch had fallen behind her, the flat had begun to hum with emptiness, and he’d gone to the bed and stripped it as if he had caught her with someone else.

He looked at the mattress’s grid of squashy diamonds, satiny and synthetic, the stains here and there that he wanted to think were coffee. Unlike the rest of the furniture, the bed did not belong to the landlord. It was Claire’s. He’d never been sure how he felt about that. Was sleeping on a stranger’s mattress, where untold numbers of other strangers had previously had sex, any worse than sleeping on the mattress upon which your own girlfriend had fucked dozens of other men before she met you?

He ferreted the notebook out.

B. was a virgin. He came to my room in halls one night and we discussed it and in the process of the discussion he told me that he would like his first time to be with me, so I obliged. We put the lamp on. We went to bed. He was smiling, but not to cover up his nervousness – it was a kind, honest smile that acknowledged his anxiety and his own amusement at himself. He was a very calm presence although he trembled. The skin of his chest was brown and soft, his nipples very plump, and his penis was large – too large, almost, improbably mismatched to his gentleness. He didn’t know what to do with it. On one level I liked the feeling that I did know what I was doing – I liked the power, the confidence, it gave me. On another level I felt closed out of my own experience, but this time by the power I held, not by the power I was lacking. Afterwards he was plainly grateful but also, I suspect now, probably disappointed, and perhaps even hurt by the whole thing, while I made crude comments to myself like ‘I’ve deflowered a virgin!’, enjoying the illusion that I’d done this sensitively, when of course I had deprived him of the chance I’d had myself: to do it for the first time with someone who loved him.