*

Soon after my lunch with Hunter I was incapacitated by a mysterious illness which my dentist finally identified as trench mouth, but for three hours that first afternoon, sitting in the tiny study that had been carved out of the attic space above the house, I worked methodically on the letters. The skylights were open for the breeze and I could smell the scent of the horse-chestnut candles in the park and hear the faint chimes of an ice-cream van that trolled the streets around the house in the hour after school ended. That smell, those sounds, and my immersion in the writing of someone I had once loved like an old friend sent me into the kind of fruitful work trance that I felt I had lost the knack for. I read and annotated the extracts, trying to hold my initial certainty about their authorship in check, and to arrive at a verdict dispassionately, balancing the claims of style, vocabulary and subject matter.

Some time after five o’clock, I became aware of a presence in the darkening room. I looked up from the papers on my desk and saw my son sitting in the armchair with an anxious look on his face.

‘Why did you call me Lucius?’ he asked.

‘Why?’ I felt groggy and disoriented being roused from my work. My mind was full of balanced periods and quaint Johnsonian English: irremeable, Cantharides, chymistry.

‘You’re nearly fifteen. Aren’t we both a bit old for these questions?’

‘Really, Dad, why?’

‘Your mother chose Sarah’s name, so it was my turn to pick and I chose Lucius.’

‘Yes, but why?’

‘It’s a lovely name, it comes from lux, meaning light. A bearer of light.’

‘Dwayne Tennant says it’s a pussy name.’

‘Dwayne Tennant? Well, what does he know?’ I opened my web browser. ‘Look: see what it says here: “Lucius – Roman praenomen, or given name, which was derived from Latin lux, light. Two Etruscan kings of early Rome had this name as well as several later Romans, including Lucius Annaeus Seneca” – You’ve got the same name as Seneca –’

‘Great.’

‘“– A famous statesman, philosopher, orator and tragedian. Also three popes have borne this name.”’

Lucius looked pained and unconvinced. I tried another tactic.

‘Well, let’s see if Dwayne’s name is in the database. “Dwayne – anglicised from the Gaelic Dubhan, which means little and dark, derived from dubh, ‘dark, black’, combined with a diminutive suffix.” So the next time Dwayne gives you any shit, you tell him his name means small and black.’

‘That’s half right, anyway. He’s six foot two and looks like Sol Campbell.’

‘Sol?’

‘He plays for Portsmouth.’

‘Sol? That’s Spanish for sun. He’s more or less got the same name as you!’

Thanks, Dad. You’ve been a big help.’

*

Oh Lucius. In my next incarnation, let me forget your pained face as I pleaded with your mother to recognise me on my return. No. Let you forget. My first wish must be for your happiness.

You slipped out of the room and the hopefulness that I had felt a few minutes earlier seemed to vanish with you. The pages of notes I’d made and the transcripts that had evoked the sound of a sage, loved voice felt like a grotesque irrelevance.

Every morning you slunk out of our house after breakfast, leaving behind the books and the smell of coffee, and the sound of someone’s voice on Radio 4 holding forth about Noh theatre or Medici Florence or house prices, and like a spy going deep undercover into enemy territory, you entered a world that was a terrible inversion of everything I had taught you to value: a world shaped by toughness, boastful ignorance, firm gender stereotypes, underachievement and the threat of violence.

Your mother, no doubt, would mock me for melodrama.

The school you were at was by no means the worst in the area, but when I compared the education you were getting to the one I had received, I felt ashamed – of my failings as a father, of my insistence on sticking to an impossible, underpaid profession, and more primitively, of my inability to protect you from unnecessary emotional hardship.

You were like me at your age: slight, undergrown, sensitive, too small to be useful at sports or fighting. But unlike me, you shut down in the classroom. At open days, the bland generic comments of your teachers made me suspect they had difficulty remembering who you were. The needs of boys like you were crowded out by the educational emergencies, the budding sociopaths, the cultural insistence on loud and flash and don’t care.

Your trick was to keep your head down. Did you see that I knew that? Somewhere between our front door and the school gates, you became invisible. That was your chosen method of survival. But now this snag: the name – Lucius, like a monstrous barnacle on an aerodynamic hull, like a pink feather in a forage cap, was blowing your cover.

What I would give – what wouldn’t I give? – to be with you all again. As I was.

*

Leonora had invited Caspar and Hilary for dinner that night. I was silent for much of the meal, mainly preoccupied with Hunter’s letters, though I had other reasons to be charmless, too.

One miserable Christmas, two years earlier, fossicking through my shelves for a top-up present to add to Leonora’s exiguous pile (perfume, a diary, Wolford stockings), I opened, of all things, a copy of Madame Bovary and out dropped a photograph of Leonora and Caspar, not in a strictly intimate pose, but smiling and entwined, with their linked arms supporting the camera, in a way that made its implications impossible to deny; and, to her credit, she didn’t.

Leonora told me at the time that the photo was an old one. We’d had some difficult years after Lucius was born. She said it had been a brief and thoughtless fling and begged me not to pursue it. I did as she asked and tried to be magnanimous about the affair, but it always hurt me the way Leonora lit up when Caspar arrived.

Lately, there had been no closeness between us. I was philosophical about it. The love in marriage turns like the lamp in a lighthouse, leaving you in darkness for long stretches, but it always comes back. I believe that, but I can’t tell if it’s a thought or a quotation. That’s one of the anxieties about the Procedure. That it turns you into a kind of fleshly Bartlett’s.

Caspar’s money has always been part of the problem for me. Leonora doesn’t suit the suburban grime of Tooting, or being married to an academic. There’s something Notting Hill manqué about her. We battled on afterwards, but my feelings for her became complicated by a demeaning gratitude that she hadn’t left me for Caspar; I’d paw at her futilely from my side of the bed, my desire sharpened by the knowledge of her infidelity.

I told the doctors here about it during one of my assessments. Could a total stranger have known that? The detail about Madame Bovary? Doesn’t that prove I’m me?

There’s literally nothing – and imagine my academic aversion to that adverb, but here it’s justified – literally nothing that they will take as evidence. I’ve raged at them about it. At the formal hearing I tried everything. I harangued them with a desperate curriculum vitae of names, dates, pets, old teachers, addresses, first kisses and favourite colours; but the password to my old life is irretrievably lost. In the end, they forcibly sedated me: six of them held me down and I got a huge shot of Largactil in my backside. I woke up in a seclusion cell two days later with a chemical hangover that was almost as bad as coming round after the Procedure. I only exaggerate a little. I can’t go through that again. Apart from anything, I haven’t got the time to waste. I’ve seen how quickly the final lap comes on you when it comes.

*

Caspar brought the unfamiliar smell of money into our house. With him around – leaving aside for the moment the fact that he’d fucked my wife – you were always reminded that we were living through a potlatch of financial excess. Yet instead of feeling that there was something rather disgusting about the amounts Caspar was earning, I always felt that I was at fault. At that moment in history, to be earning as little as I did, after the education I’d had, seemed like a culpable incompetence.