‘We just slipped out the back, not in the lav, but actually in the sort of yard with the crates. Ever so quick.’

‘But what about poor little whatsisname?’

‘Arthur? Oh, he was sitting there waiting for me, all sleepy and unsuspecting. Actually, Massimo said he wanted to have him too, but I did draw the line there.’

‘Was it like we always imagined?’

‘Mm, was rather. Everything on the menu, you know; full helpings.’ I leered helplessly. ‘But I should have a go some time-I’m sure he’s anybody’s…’

‘Thanks!’

‘No, I mean, I’m sure there’d be no problem.’

‘They do say, waiters…’ murmured James, in a tone of smothered excitement. ‘What’s Arthur’s… member like, incidentally?’

‘Entirely delightful. Not your kind of thing, perhaps-short, stocky, ruthlessly circumcised, and incredibly resilient and characterful.’

James let a pause fall in which the brio of my testimonial edged towards embarrassment and then said, ‘So you’re in love with him, are you?’ I took a professional sip of Guinness.

‘I can’t be, actually,’ I admitted. ‘We couldn’t sit down and listen to Idomeneo and feel a deep spiritual bond. It must just be an infatuation. Sometimes I don’t feel I know him at all, which adds to the poignancy of the thing no end. And then Holland Park and my place is all a completely new world to him. He lives with all his family in a tower block. I said wouldn’t his mother worry about where he was, but he said he often didn’t go back home. They don’t have a phone, so he couldn’t let them know. But I imagine he’s gone back there today-he had to go and sign on. But’-I drew round to it-‘you’re quite right: it can’t last. I don’t want it to really-it’s just been a heavenly week.’

We strolled off under James’s umbrella to Westbourne Grove. One of the slight bores about James was that he was a vegetarian-so going out to dinner with him required careful planning. In the event we had a delicious Belpoori that cost almost nothing, served by a boy James ogled with a quite new kind of forwardness, while the rain lashed down outside. Perhaps it was the rain that made us reminisce, about beautiful Oxford contemporaries and how they had become bankers, or put on weight, or got married.