‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Too much sodomy, I should say.’ And then, as if in surgery, picking up my Guinness bottle: ‘Take this tonic twice a day and have a complete rest: we’ll soon have you back to normal.’

It was charming to see him, though looking (worthily, selflessly) tired himself. I didn’t comment on this, for his overwork and his unfairly long spells on call depressed him and were making him look older. He sat beside me with his drink, and I ran my hand over his head, bald now to half way back. He smiled, and put a kiss on my cheekbone.

‘How are the ill?’ I asked.

‘Oh, fine,’ he said.

‘Anything interesting?’ The bizarre things that people said and did in the consulting room were a staple of our conversation.

‘Not really. The woman with the stones came back. And I had a lad in this morning with the most enormous donger.’ James was obsessed by big cocks, many of which seemed to pass through his hands in his professional capacity-though all too few, I suspected, in his private one.

‘How big?’ I enquired.

‘Ooh…’ he gestured with his hands, like a fisherman-‘in its flaccid condition that is. Quite unbearably hideous youth, alas. He seemed to think there was something wrong with it-so I told him to go to the clinic.’ He took a deep draught of beer. ‘Fantastic cock, though,’ he added wistfully.

I chuckled. ‘You’d have been proud of me the other day,’ I said, ‘when I did a very heroic deed and saved the life of a queer peer.’ And I related the incident in the Kensington Gardens bog. ‘It was all due to you, darling,’ I said. ‘I remembered what you do on trains.’

‘I’m impressed and proud,’ James said. ‘But a Lord-a Baron, or something bigger do you suppose?’

‘Looked like a Baron to me,’ I said-and with a silly smirk, ‘anyway you wouldn’t find a Viscount cottaging…’

‘Not yet, you wouldn’t,’ James tartly rejoined. ‘Has he been in touch since?’