No silent films were shot in colour but the pictures through a window are that. Everything moves in curious clockwork animation. Why is that man throwing up his arms? The girl’s hands move soundlessly over the piano. Only half an inch of glass separates me from the silent world where I do not exist. They don’t know I’m here but I have begun to be as intimate with them as any member of the family. More so, since as their lips move with goldfish bowl pouts, I am the scriptwriter and I can put words in their mouths. I had a girlfriend once, we used to play that game, going round the posh houses when we were down at heel making up stories about the lamplit well-to-do.

Her name was Catherine, she wanted to be a writer. She said it was good exercise for her imagination to invent little scenarios for the unsuspecting. I don’t want to be a writer but I didn’t mind carrying her pad. It did occur to me, those dark nights, that movies are a terrible sham. In real life, left to their own devices, especially after 7 o’clock, human beings hardly move at all. Sometimes I panicked and told Catherine we’d have to call the ambulance.

‘No-one can sit still for that long,’ I said. ‘She must be dead. Look at her, rigor mortis has set in, not so much as a squint.’

Then we’d go to an arthouse showing of Chabrol or Renoir and the entire cast spent the whole picture running in and out of bedrooms and shooting at one another and getting divorced. I was exhausted. The French crack on about being an intellectual resource but for a nation of thinkers they do run around a lot. Thinking is supposed to be a sedentary occupation. They pack more action into their arty films than the Americans manage in a dozen Clint Eastwoods. Jules et Jim is an action movie.

We were so happy those wet carefree nights. I felt we were like Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes. I knew my place. And then Catherine said she was leaving. She didn’t want to do it but she felt that a writer doesn’t make a good companion. ‘It’s only a matter of time’, she said, ‘before I become an alcoholic and forget how to cook.’

I suggested we wait and try and ride it out. She shook her head sadly and patted me. ‘Get a dog.’

Naturally I was devastated. I enjoyed our wandering nights together, the brief stop at the fish shop, falling into the same bed at dawn.

‘Is there anything I can do for you before you go?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Do you know why Henry Miller said “I write with my prick”?’

‘Because he did. When he died they found nothing between his legs but a ball-point pen.’

‘You’re making it up,’ she said.

Am I?

I was sitting on the bench smiling soaked to the skin. I wasn’t happy but the power of memory is such that it can lift reality for a time. Or is memory the more real place? I stood up and wrung out the legs of my shorts. It was dark, the park belonged to other people after dark and I didn’t belong to them. Best to go home and find Jacqueline.