‘You never said what happened to those papers you were working on for Hunter,’ said Leonora, as we walked though the dusk. ‘Did they turn out to be real?’

My astonishment at her curiosity was compounded by my amazement that she’d paid enough attention in the first place to know what I had been doing. I must have looked surprised.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I didn’t know you were interested.’

‘I’m interested in your work.’

‘That, to make an understatement, is an overstatement.’

‘Oh fuck off, Nicky.’

‘I was joking.’

‘There’s no such thing as a joke.’

It’s odd to think we must have uttered each of those sentences to each other on dozens of occasions. It was a dance we’d done a hundred times before. The phrases were boiler-plate, like the obligatory epithets of legal documents. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I got overexcited. It’s so rare to feel like we might be getting along.’

‘There you go again. Veering wildly between contempt and melodrama.’

Terrifying, really. It’s as though the words own us, funnelling us back down the channels of old experiences.

‘Please, Leonora. This is important.’

The hint of frank desperation in my voice jolted her out of the familiar script.

‘You asked me about Hunter and I want to tell you.’ I had never previously contemplated owning up to my embarrassment over the forged letters, but I knew I was about to. ‘A very strange thing happened,’ I said.

‘Strange?’

‘Strange. And embarrassing.’

‘Embarrassing?’ Those odd echoes had more real life in them than anything we’d said up to that moment. At this instant, on the point of sharing my humiliation with my wife, I felt on the brink of a kind of renewal; new possibilities were opening in front of us.

Just then, her phone rang. She hesitated for an instant, then paused my anecdote with a consolatory tap of my arm. One of my students, she mouthed. I walked beside her in silence as they rescheduled a lesson. By the time they’d finished talking we’d reached the shop and we were swallowed up by the party. On such chance occurrences, the shape of a life turns. The light had revolved again, casting its beam towards a distant shore. Many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design or purpose.

*

The launch was held in a rare-book shop on Ledbury Road that specialises in modern first editions. There was a display of Sheldon’s creation, The End of the Book, in the front window. Hunter was on a chair in the back of the shop. He was clearly the eminence of the launch. On his lap lay a gold-topped cane, which enhanced his kingly bearing. His assistant, Preethika, controlled the flow of well-wishers who came to pay obeisance to her boss, letting them through one at a time. I found myself looking at one of Sheldon’s books as I waited for a slot to approach Hunter.

‘It’s vellum and goatskin. Feel it,’ said a rasping, upper-class voice beside me. It was Sheldon. He held one of his books towards me. He was about my age, cadaverous and effeminately handsome, wearing a bespoke suit, a cravat and a skull ring. I recognised him from his pictures in the papers. He’d famously had himself crucified in the Philippines about five years earlier as part of a previous artistic project.

The book sat weightily in my palm. It was a beautiful thing, redolent of ink and freshly tanned leather.

‘Every one is completely unique,’ Sheldon said proudly. ‘I write them by hand. The printed book is over. This is about getting back to its artisanal origins, pre-Gutenberg. I take my inspiration from the Luttrell Psalter. You’ve heard of it?’

I told him I had. The boards were held together with an emerald-coloured binding so new that it creaked open reluctantly, as though shamed by its bathetic contents. The inside pages had been written entirely by hand. I could see messy handwriting, badly drawn stick-men with thought bubbles coming out of their heads; one of the pages was stuck all over with penny postage stamps; another contained what looked like a recipe for apple crumble.

‘I thought it was a novel.’

‘It is.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘You’ll have to buy it to find out, but it’s got everything: love, death and an amusing dog.’

‘This one’s got a recipe for apple crumble,’ I said.

‘Don’t you love that about the novel? The capaciousness?’ he said, waving to someone at the other side of the room. A woman teetered over to kiss him on both cheeks.

*

When my turn came to see Hunter, I noticed his clothes were hanging more loosely and I asked if he’d lost weight. He said he’d had keyhole surgery on his knee and his doctor had put him on a new diet. He got to his feet, put his arm around me and turned us both away from the throng. I could feel his newly skinny forearm pressing sharply into my back.

‘Sinan not coming?’ I said.

‘He’s in Moscow on business.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Leonora talking animatedly to Hunter’s girlfriend, a striking Chinese American woman called Candy Go.

‘No hard feelings about the whole letters thing?’ Hunter said.

‘As far as I’m concerned it never happened.’

Hunter gave me an approving pat. ‘Listen. I have some sad news about Jack,’ he said.

Because of his suddenly sombre tone, I was already framing his next sentence in my mind, and yet the words still came as a shock.

‘Jack passed away last night.’

The room seemed to contract around us. Sheldon was laughing uproariously. A waitress passed me bearing a tray of blinis.

I was so befuddled by the news that I asked him when it happened, forgetting that he’d already told me.

‘Last night,’ he said. ‘It was very sudden.’

‘I saw him two days ago,’ I said. ‘He seemed fine.’

Hunter shook his head regretfully. ‘He was in terrible physical shape. The drugs he was on were highly toxic. His kidney function was impaired. It was only a matter of time.’ But in the inflection of his voice, I seemed to hear him saying: one fewer problem for both of us.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘He was …’ But I couldn’t think what to add. ‘I should call Vera.’

‘Maybe drop her a note; to be honest, I think what she needs now is space to grieve.’

He gave my shoulder a valedictory squeeze and sailed out into the party.

The strength of my reaction took me by surprise. I couldn’t call Jack a friend, but his life seemed to have touched me quite profoundly: his vulnerability, the sense of displacement. I remembered his pained, knowing eyes and the touch of his hand. Poor Vera, I thought, poor Jack. It was hard to believe that that big body was now inert, its light extinguished. My vision swam with tears. I couldn’t understand it. Even then, my sense of loss struck me as disproportionate. I wasn’t sure why I cared so much. I thought perhaps it was a symptom of low-level depression: overinvesting in some alien misery, like Byron in his letter to Hobhouse, crying over the goldfish.

*

Our plan had been to leave the launch at eight and go to dinner, but it was closer to nine when we extricated ourselves from the party. Candy and Leonora had struck up a friendship in the way that pretty women seem to do in order to neutralise the threat of each other.

‘Hunter’s talked a lot about you,’ Candy said to me when I brought Leonora her coat, in a way that let me know he hadn’t. There was a – I don’t want to call it a smell, but it struck me like an odour – let’s call it an emanation coming off her. It oozed from her skin, and her boots and leather miniskirt and her silk scarf, and her impeccable hair. It was the aura of money. Ordinarily, that realisation would have been enough to set me fretting over my impoverishment and my life choices and pity my wife in her old dress, but the news about Jack Telauga shamed me out of all that. I felt profoundly grateful to be alive and to be taking my wife out to dinner.