And about abstruse academic subjects.

“Who is the Lady of the Sycamores?”

“Hathor, Egyptian goddess of love, beauty, and so on. I may have misquoted. My specialty is classics, not Egyptology.”

“Greats,” I said. “Isn’t that what you call it? You went down with a first in Greats?”

“Well, not exactly,” John said, amused. “It cannot be said that I went down from university, as the idiom has it; rather, I was pushed off the ladder of learning.”

“Far be it from me to ask why.”

“It wasn’t extortion or fraud, if that’s what you are implying. Just a little matter of a tutor arriving home before he was expected.”

“I’m sure there is an Old Testament parallel.”

“Oh, quite. Potiphar’s wife. I was very young and naïve. I didn’t take up a life of crime until after that,” John went on cheerfully. “Someday I must tell you about my first scam. I don’t believe I have ever equaled the sheer splendid lunacy of that concept. It didn’t come off, unfortunately, but I’m still immensely proud of it.”

And about his family.

“Is your mother’s name really Guinevere?”

“It really is.”

“I’d love to meet her.”

“You wouldn’t like her.” After another of those meaningful pauses in which he excelled, he added, “She wouldn’t like you either.”

But not about the gold of Troy.

We recited poetry and sang, to keep awake. I taught John all the words to Schmidt’s favorite Christmas carol, which he approved—“kitsch at its finest”—and he taught me the second part of the glorious duet in Bach’s Cantata 140, where the soprano’s “mein Freund ist mein” is echoed by the baritone’s “und ich bin dein.” My voice had suddenly descended from soprano to tenor during my last year in high school, so I took the baritone part and John sang soprano, both of us shifting octaves with reckless abandon. John was an excellent musician; I wondered whether he knew that my most secret, unfulfilled ambition was to be able to sing. He was kind enough to refrain from critical comment and I sang away with happy incompetence, no longer bothered by the ghostly responses from the rafters. “My friend is mine—and I am thine.”

“Isn’t that a little romantic for J. S. Bach?” I asked.

John was trying to play the oboe obbligato on a tissue-covered comb. He broke off long enough to remark, “Your theology is deficient, duckie. It’s not a love song, it’s all about the marriage of the faithful soul to Christ.”

“It sounds like a love song.”

“So it does,” John said agreeably. He returned to the comb.

I fell asleep in the middle of a long lecture on horticulture—I remember he waxed eloquent on the subject of double digging, a technique on whose details I am hazy, but which, he said, his mother insisted upon—and did not waken until he moved to put more wood on the fire. I rubbed my eyes. “Sorry. I’m so tired….”

“You’ve had a busy day. Why don’t you lie down?”