During those two years when, at Xan’s invitation, I was a kind of observer-adviser at the Council meetings, it was usual for journalists to write that we had been brought up together, that we were as close as brothers. It wasn’t true. From the age of twelve we spent the summer holidays together, but that was all. The error wasn’t surprising. I half believed it myself. Even now the summer term seems in retrospect a boring concatenation of predictable days dominated by timetables, neither painful nor feared but to be endured and occasionally, briefly, enjoyed, since I was both clever and reasonably popular, until the blessed moment of release. After a couple of days at home I would be sent to Woolcombe.

Even as I write I am trying to understand what I felt for Xan then, why the bond remained so strong and for so long. It wasn’t sexual, except that in nearly all close friendships there is a subcutaneous pricking of sexual attraction. We never touched, not even, I remember, in boisterous play. There was no boisterous play—Xan hated to be touched and I early recognized and respected his invisible no-man’s-land, as he respected mine. It wasn’t, either, the usual story of the dominant partner, the elder, if only by four months, leading the younger, his admiring disciple. He never made me feel inferior; that wasn’t his way. He welcomed me without particular warmth but as if he were receiving back his twin, a part of himself.