We considered the options known to us: prim virgin (now ex-virgin), tarty shopgirl, experienced older woman, VD-riddled whore. We discussed this until Adrian redirected our interests.

‘Camus said that suicide was the only true philosophical question.’

‘Apart from ethics and politics and aesthetics and the nature of reality and all the other stuff.’ There was an edge to Alex’s riposte.

‘The only true one. The fundamental one on which all others depend.’

After a long analysis of Robson’s suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet’s numbers constant. But in all other respects we judged that Robson had let us – and serious thinking – down. His action had been unphilosophical, self-indulgent and inartistic: in other words, wrong. As for his suicide note, which according to rumour (Brown again) read ‘Sorry, Mum’, we felt that it had missed a powerful educative opportunity.

Perhaps we wouldn’t have been so hard on Robson if it hadn’t been for one central, unshiftable fact: Robson was our age, he was in our terms unexceptional, and yet he had not only conspired to find a girlfriend but also, incontestably, to have had sex with her. Fucking bastard! Why him and not us? Why had none of us even had the experience of failing to get a girlfriend? At least the humiliation of that would have added to our general wisdom, given us something to negatively boast about (‘Actually, “pustular berk with the charisma of a plimsole” were her exact words’). We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.