That was all I got out of him. That one word. It was obvious there was something amiss with him. He was, quite possibly, mad. But he wasn’t as inward as you’d expect a savant to be. Just as I’d noticed the first time, there was a lively connection to the world in his pained eyes.

As soon as he had woken up he signalled to Vera for a glass of water. She poured him water from his jug and he drank it greedily, panting thirstily into the glass and spilling drops down his clothing. ‘Might I trouble you, madam, for another?’

Vera nodded and left the room to refill the jug.

Bykov, who had relaxed his earlier vigilance after my third or fourth visit to the house, was nowhere to be seen, and I decided to take the opportunity to address Jack directly. ‘My name is Nicholas,’ I said. ‘What is yours?’

Without lifting his eyes to me, he said, ‘I am a man who lives in a dream of despondency. I am out of my wits, sir. Forgive me.’ He had a big basso voice like Hunter’s, but with none of Hunter’s seduction; it had a funereal gravity and trailed into silence as he finished.

He sank back onto the bed and it creaked under him. Then he seemed to shut down. His body went very still. Even the twitching stopped. I said a few words to him and, when I could get nothing in reply, touched his hand. It was burning hot. When Vera returned with his water, I told her he seemed feverish. She felt his forehead and opened his window slightly.

I glanced at Vera. Her face was stony and pale. ‘You said he couldn’t speak,’ I said.

‘He speaks.’

*

As June wore on, my visits continued. Malevin was never there and the vast house was echoing and unoccupied. Once or twice I saw a Czech or Polish housekeeper manoeuvring a huge vacuum cleaner through the hallways. There was a cook, who I think may have been Spanish, but the house was evidently maintained with the bare minimum of staff.

Whenever I asked where Malevin was, Vera would tell me variously that he was away on business, in the south of France, or in Moscow, and offered no further details. She was more forthcoming, however, on the subject of her own life. She told me how she had dreamed as a child of becoming a dancer, leaving me to conclude that her physical abnormality had made it impossible. She had learned English at school, she said, and explained that memorising Shakespeare’s sonnets had kindled her love of the language.

‘All of them?’ I said, with polite incredulity.

She opened her hands towards me and invited me to pick a number.

I chose 44, more or less at random, and because I was sure it wasn’t one of the famous ones.

She set down her coffee cup, brushed something out of her left eye with her knuckle and recited without hesitation in a low voice that was salted with the Russian cadences of her accent:

‘If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,

Injurious distance should not stop my way;

For then, despite of space, I would be brought

From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.’

In mid-June, Sotheby’s had a rare book and manuscript sale which included a Fourth Folio and some bona fide Johnsoniana. I went to the preview, half expecting to run into Hunter or Malevin, but if they had any interest in the items they were bidding by proxy.

One of the Johnson letters was reproduced, actual size, on a gatefold page in the auction catalogue and I took it round to show Jack.

Unusually, he was up and about, actually wandering around the house in tracksuit bottoms, a velvet shirt and bare feet.

‘Dr Slopen,’ he said. ‘I am very pleased to see you. Give me your hand.’

This time it was icy and the skin on it papery dry.

He held my gaze for an uncomfortably long time, staring unblinkingly into my eyes until I was forced to turn away, discomfited. I mentioned the auction catalogue. He didn’t take the hint until Vera intervened, telling him that I had brought something for him. He let my hand drop and I took the catalogue from my bag and opened it to the marked page. He touched the paper, as if befuddled by the nature of the image, which had all the look of manuscript and yet was glossy and smooth.

‘Truly,’ he said to himself in a voice barely above a whisper, ‘the madman dwells in a world of wonders.’

I believe that my first visit was motivated by a combination of curiosity and wounded pride. The sight of Jack writing, the proof that he really was the author of the letters, diminished my sense of shame about the forgeries. Somehow, being deceived by Jack – if deceived is the right word – was more tolerable than being bested by one of my peers. Jack was so vulnerable, his confusion so profound, that I couldn’t be envious of him, or even consider him an adversary.

But what drew me back? Certainly, I’d grown to like and respect Vera, and I felt a kind of fondness for her brother. But there was something else as well: an uncanny fascination with the man. It was as though his pained eyes held some knowledge that I’d lost. I saw in them something that I dimly knew: an unplaceable recollection, the stirring of old memories, a fragment of a half-remembered dream. And in my imagination his hopeless voice seemed to bubble up from the very depths of the underworld.

11

I was certain at the time that Hunter and Malevin knew of my comings and goings. I assumed that Vera had cleared it with one or both of them before admitting me to Jack’s room to watch him work, and that she reported to them after my subsequent visits. But I never imagined they would come to feel threatened by my interest.

The next I heard from Hunter was in the third week of June. As part of his larger self-deception that he is somehow a patron of the arts, Hunter had commissioned the creation of a limited edition of a new work by a writer and artist called Pascal Sheldon; his assistant sent an email inviting me and Leonora to its launch at short notice.

It was a gesture of conciliation. Hunter was smooth and wily enough to see that after shaming me with the fakes it would be politic to pour a little balm on my injured ego. And he did so in a way that was intended both to flatter me and to remind me of the gulf in status between us.

From where I sit, all my recollections are precious ones, but when I met Leonora that evening she seemed to shine on me with a radiance I hadn’t seen for years. We had arranged to meet in the Portuguese cafe that had been one of the backdrops of our courtship and both came straight from work. I complimented her on her new dress.

She shrugged. ‘It’s an old one.’

‘We used to meet here,’ I said. ‘Remember?’

‘Yes. Back in Roman times.’ She glanced up as she stirred her coffee and there was humour and a kind of excitement in her brown eyes. That turning lamp had finally revolved back on me. Being loved: it’s the opposite of the Procedure. It’s like finding your way back to your original carcass. Restoration. Redemption. Home.

The evening was so warm and humid it was like wearing wet clothes and Leonora’s legs were bare. Her Asiatic skin – Sarah has it too – is sallow through the long dark English winter, but it turns golden at the slightest suggestion of sun. She would be forty soon – she is one year older than me – but the mellowness of her middle-aged beauty had a sweetness and a plangency that moved me more than ever.

‘Shouldn’t we be going?’ she said.

I remember thinking: we should treasure this moment. After the series of crises we’d lived through: an abrupt marriage, sudden parenthood, the pangs and disappointments of raising children, two demanding careers, the affair: after all this, finally to fetch up in the landscape where we’d courted, still young enough, still healthy enough for love; solvent, working, absolved of the harshest demands of childcare. I thought to myself: I am blessed.