My Best Books

As a new month begins, test your knowledge of the best opening lines in literature. Find out here if you are in the first rank – or an April fool

As I proved at a recent pub quiz, it’s not easy being an existentialist in today’s moral greyscale

Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous proponent of the principles of existentialism, believed that hell was other people; but I’ve found that hell is being a person trying to live life according to existentialist principles: taking responsibility for yourself, acting decisively without procrastinating, and committing yourself to a course of action without denying the consequences.

I’m clearly not alone in finding such an approach difficult in a culture of least resistance. In his book The Age of Absurdity, Michael Foley identifies many of the existential problems of a society in which stimulation is so easy to come by that there’s little need to challenge yourself or others. At the same time, Gary Cox’s recent book How to Be an Existentialist, bracingly subtitled How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses, claims that “people who reject existentialism tend to do so not because they don’t understand it but because they can’t face it”. If there’s one thing worse than being a philistine, it’s being a sissy.

Being an existentialist requires being satisfied with the absurd and random nature of events, freeing you to create your own life in circumstances that aren’t of your own making. According to Cox’s no-nonsense criteria I’m a kind of existential softy, in sympathy with Alan Bennett, who classified himself as being on the political “soft centre”. I’d like to be an existentialist in the sense of wanting to approach life as though I were a mind-body battering ram, but tend instead to hover at obstacles wondering what the best course of action would be from every possible angle, knowing really that there is no best or worst, simply what is, and must be, dealt with.

At the centre of this philosophy is the insistence that, while you must think, there’s a time when you have to act on what you’ve been thinking about. At a pub quiz a few weeks ago I hesitated to hand in the answer – correct, as it transpired – to a tie-break question in case it was wrong, causing our team to lose the £50 jackpot. My hesitation seemed to be born of the belief that the sky would fall in if I didn’t get the answer right. If I’d acted decisively (tuts coach Sartre) we’d at least have had half a chance.

The tenets of existentialism, or rather their absence, can be witnessed in everyday life – which is why, unlike Cox, I think it’s perfectly possible to be an existentialist without first studying Nietszche. Bad faith and wilful ignorance are everywhere present in public discourse, such as in wanting cheap goods while blaming migrants for low wages, in spouting populist opinions and then berating politicians for the consequences of populist policies, in blaming cakes for obesity and guns for murder.

But here again my inner softy counsels caution. We can’t reject the loop-like nature of how individual actions contribute to social effects, which in turn influence individual actions. You can’t eat a hamburger by osmosis, but it would be stubborn to deny that capitalism has an interest in getting you to eat more of them than is healthy.

There are some unfortunate proponents of the law of individual responsibility, who corrupt the essentially optimistic nature of existentialism. The writings of doctor and professional cynic Theodore Dalrymple never fail to read the weakest motives into any individual action and make one feel as though life is wasted on those who don’t know the one correct way in which to live.

It’s not so much that existentialist thinking can’t be applied to life’s moral greyscale. It’s more that the problem with maintaining, or at least refusing to challenge, a popular political culture based on denial and hysteria is that it requires regarding people who are not like you as simultaneously less than human and superhuman. Only the deserving get to be simply human.

Which came first, orange the colour or orange the fruit? Why you couldn’t ambush the 9th Legion at night; When Blur were better than Oasis

Is an orange called an orange because it’s orange, or is orange orange because of the orange? Which came first, the fruit or the colour?

The fruit came first. The English word “orange” has made quite a journey to get here. The fruit originally came from China – the German word Apfelsine and the Dutch sinaasappel (Chinese apple) reflect this – but our word ultimately comes from the Old Persian “narang”. Early Persian emperors collected exotic trees for their landscape gardens, which may well have included orange trees. Arabs later traded the fruit and spread the word all the way to Moorish Spain; the Spanish word for orange is “naranja”. In Old French, the fruit became “orenge” and this was adopted into Middle English, eventually becoming our orange, fruit as well as colour.

Anna Alberda Ellis, Huddersfield

As the instance of “pume orenge” in a 13th-century Anglo-Norman manuscript indicates, orange was in fact first used as an adjective. Yet, the Persian word from which “orange” is derived did not refer to the colour of the fruit, but to the bitterness of its skin. Orange as a colour adjective dates from the early 16th century; therefore we can say that the orange is called orange because it is orange, as well as orange is orange because of the orange.

Wilfried Heinz, Tübingen, Germany

There are very few pure colour names like black, white, red, blue, green or brown; most of the hundreds of words we use for colours come from things such as fruit, flowers, precious stones and other objects, eg cerise, turquoise, indigo, violet, amber. Witness a recent Simon Hoggart’s sketch (Guardian, March 19): “His [Sir Hayden Phillips's] face, normally the colour of terracotta, went through plum tomato, to brick red and on to tomato.”

Ormond Uren, London NW5

A new film, Centurion, suggests that a Roman legion (the 9th) was wiped out in Scotland in AD117. Did this really happen?

The film Centurion is not based upon the book The Eagle of the Ninth, beyond the idea of the disappearing ninth legion (N&Q, 24 March). Award-winning novelist Rosemary Sutcliff’s story is of a young Roman who goes on a quest with his slave Esca to discover the fate of his father’s lost ninth legion, restore his father’s reputation, and retrieve the lost eagle. It is the basis of the film The Eagle of the Ninth, being made by Kevin Macdonald. My evidence for this? I look after Rosemary Sutcliff’s books and legacy, as her onetime godson and cousin..

Anthony Lawton, Leicester

I would be very surprised if a Roman legion would have been destroyed as it slept in camp (N&Q, 24 March). A Roman legion in enemy territory would have built a marching fort, which would have prevented it being rushed by an attacking force. Sentries would have been placed to give early warning of an attack.

Also, a night attack is very difficult to organise. An interesting parallel is the attempted night attack by the Jacobite army on the government army before the battle of Culloden in 1746. Despite being on home ground and having local guides, the Jacobites got lost and the attack had to be abandoned. The difficulties facing a tribal chieftain in the Roman period would, if anything, have been greater. So it is very unlikely to have happened that way.

Andrew Tampion, Hinckley, Leics

What is there in a song that makes someone like it? I love key changes, but no one else seems to – why is this?

I think that musicians regard a key change as a cheap method of creating emotion in a song: the shift in key is a very functional way of seeming to make the song “soar”. A song such as Oasis’s All Around the World illustrates this; the chorus is simply too dull without the key change, which gives it the feel of being anthemic. Compare this to, say, Blur’s Tender (to reopen mid-90s wounds), which stays in one key and has a hook that is repeated a lot: it stays interesting because of subtle changes in lengths of chorus, guitar line and backing vocals.

Keith Williams, London

Any answers

When a major work of art is sold to an anonymous buyer, does it completely vanish or do insiders in the art world know where it is?

Sally Howel, London SW2

Is any research going on into a depilatory to replace shaving? There is something a bit bronze age about scraping one’s face with a razor.

Alan Rooks, Leicester

Send questions and answers to nq@guardian.co.uk. Please include name, address and phone number.

Kipper Williams: The book publisher plans to re-release the seven-book Harry Potter series with new covers to attract a new generation of readers

Visits may be in decline, but we can boost digital literacy within our communities

You report that, according to a government review, Britain’s libraries can still flourish “if they offer free internet access, Sunday opening and a promise to provide any book in the national book collection” (Free internet proposed to save struggling libraries, 22 March).

I think this is only part of the answer. Public libraries will adapt and survive because they have a crucial role to play both in fostering reading and commitment to learning, and in delivering vital digital skills and digital inclusion in an increasingly digital Britain.

You quote culture minister Margaret Hodge, who warns that “the context in which libraries operate is changing starkly and at speed”. However, digital is not the future – it is already here, and becoming increasingly essential for activities as basic as finding out about public services or looking for a job. Yet less than half the population have access to broadband.

In fact most people have broadband access via our public library network, which has a vital role to play in fostering digital inclusion by building the online skills of users both young and old. Libraries are a safe, neutral, public space with internet access and skilled staff able to offer information and advice about getting online. They also act as a portal to a wide range of other services – particularly in these economically difficult times.

You quote the review’s assertion that “changes in the market such as mass digitisation of content by Google and others, Web 2.0 technology and ebooks are changing how people want to receive and engage with information”. This is true, and to reflect their users’ changing lifestyles, libraries need to offer longer, more flexible opening hours and a wider array of services – which should include those from higher education institutions or schools. And yes, “commercial companies such as Starbucks should be allowed to set up outlets in libraries to make them more welcoming places”.

Library access to social network sites such as Facebook, and a “big extension in the availability of ebooks” are welcome. But Facebook and ebooks are just the latest technologies, not the holy grail. It is vital that libraries take a cue from users as to what content and formats they want – and what they want from their interaction with new technologies. Libraries can foster digital literacy within their communities – skills vital for our knowledge economy.

Library visits may have been “declining over the past five years”. But usage is still massive and we should not underplay the importance of great stock and the expertise of staff in the central role libraries play in both our communities and our economy.

In our public library service we have a great infrastructure on which to build a digital Britain. Through this we can increase lifelong learning, digital literacy and digital inclusion by bridging the gap between online information and services and the millions who are currently “nonline”.

Threshold Editions, £20

I have often wondered how I landed where I have in life, but you won’t find any answers here. All I will say is I had no idea my father had homosexual proclivities and if I had I would – like any true patriot – have left home a great deal sooner. What I do know is I have been a staunch Republican since I saw Richard Nixon on TV; there was something irresistible about his obvious sincerity.

After enrolling at the University of Utah in 1969, I was devastated to find I had dodged the Vietnam draft – a war I wholeheartedly supported – and threw myself into campaigning for the Republican party. OK, I made youthful mistakes. I should never have allowed myself to get caught stealing Democrat stationery and printing fake campaign fliers, but at least Republican bosses recognised my potential.

Watergate was a minor misdemeanour that Nixon’s advisers allowed to be misreported, but it did have one positive consequence: with all eyes on the president, some allegations about my own misconduct were overlooked and I soon found myself working for George Bush Sr in Texas. I had come to realise I didn’t have the looks, charm or personality to seek office, so I quickly made a name for myself as an all-purpose fixer.

In 1996, George Bush Sr called to say he wanted my help to get his idiot son into the White House. It was a tough campaign for the Republican nomination, but once we had won South Carolina the momentum was with us. Naturally McCain smeared us by accusing me of racist innuendo, but I never did it and anyway, what sort of moron thinks you can win a campaign in the South by appealing to racism?

The Democrats tried to steal the 2000 election by insisting all minority votes be counted, but I managed to persuade the Supreme Court that the law was clear: even if black people thought they had meant to vote for Al Gore, they hadn’t really. It was a momentous day when Bush made me his senior adviser.

The president immediately set about major reforms of healthcare and education. As he said to me, “The president should have no more advantages than any other American; I want every child to leave school with the reading age of a 10-year-old.” Everything changed with 9/11. As Air Force One circled over Washington, the president yelled: “Now we can forget all that pussy shit and go slot some ragheads.”

The war in Iraq was an unqualified success from day one. It would have been helpful if Hans Blix had not lied about his failure to find weapons of mass destruction, but I shoulder the blame for not having made the public believe what we wanted them to. It was hard fighting the incessant anti-Americanism of the Democrats, all of whom were communist paedophiles. So the CIA did some waterboarding? The terrorists were thirsty, for God’s sake.

We managed to win a second term although the Democrats again accused me of dirty tricks. As if. For the record, I never did anything illegal that anyone could prove. So all I’m going to say about the Valerie Plame affair, the millions of deleted emails, and the sacking of various US attorneys who weren’t supporting the president, is I’ve no idea why anyone would imagine I was implicated.

By 2005 I had become depressed at the negative reporting of the presidency. There was no point in the president going to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as the victims were all hicks and there were no votes in it, but the press tried to make a big thing out of it. It was time to move on and cash in. Oops, I see I’ve forgotten to mention my second divorce and that the House Judiciary Committee did conclude I had played a significant role in the attorney firings! But these things happen when you’re racing to get your side of the story out ahead of Dick Cheney and George Dubya. See you by the remainder pile.

Digested read, digested: Bluster and Inconsequence: My Life as Dubya’s Ally Campbell.

Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford

Theatre Alibi has a thing about espionage. Company writer Daniel Jamieson recently tackled Michael Frayn’s Spies and now he turns his attention to Graham Greene’s spy thriller set during the London Blitz.

Nikki Sved’s production is strong on atmosphere. Its sculptural design suggests broken beams and twisted metal, and there are the drifting, smoky sounds of an onstage band. It captures the dislocated and fevered sense of a wartime London where life and death sit cheek by jowl.

Arthur Rowe has served his time, but not expunged his guilt at killing his beloved, ill wife. He visits a fortune-teller at a church fete who mistakes him for someone else and gives him the correct weight in the guess-the-weight-of-the-cake competition. Soon Rowe has a cake with a top-secret ingredient, German spies on his tail and someone trying to poison his tea.

It’s fun, but sits uncomfortably between comic and psychologically serious – it lacks the comic panache of Patrick Barlow’s The 39 Steps or the emotional acuity of a Hitchcock thriller. Clarity of storytelling is too often sacrificed to the self-consciously inventive staging. Chris Bianchi’s bemused and agonised Arthur provides emotional clout, but some of the cast overdo the silly walks, silly faces and false moustaches. I’m not sure why Theatre Alibi chose this novel to adapt.

At the New Wolsey, Ipswich, 7-10 April. Box office: 01473 295900. Then touring.

Rating: 2/5

This latest report on the evidence for alien life forms is refreshingly level-headed, says David Papineau

If there are extraterrestrial civilisations out there, they don’t seem very interested in us. They don’t visit, they don’t phone, they don’t even send radio signals. Not a peep. It is easy to feel start feeling neglected once you become aware of this cosmic cold shoulder. As the eminent physicist Enrico Fermi once put it, “Where is everybody?”

It is not as if we haven’t been looking out for them. This year marks 50 years since the founding of Seti — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In his new book celebrating this anniversary, Paul Davies explains that Seti isn’t some confederation of UFO-spotters, but a group of serious scientists who scour the skies for any sign that somebody is trying to get in touch. They have deployed every modern technology in search of unusual radio signals, laser pulses or electronic beacons. But so far they have come up empty-handed. There is nothing to hear but an eerie silence.

The obvious explanation is that nobody out there has anything to say. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this. What we know of our own history shows that the emergence of advanced intelligence is a hit-or-miss affair. Even given a planet with the right environmental profile, there are many hurdles. The chemistry of life needs to congeal out of the primordial soup, and then natural selection needs to drive evolution all the way to organisms who can get a reasonable score on an IQ test.

Davies is a physicist, and is more worried about the first step than the second. He thinks that the emergence of life on earth may have been a one-off fluke, that the rest of the universe may never have cleared this first hurdle, and that the emergence of intelligence is only to be expected once life is up and running. However, a more biological perspective suggests Davies may have things the wrong way round. After all, the first stages of life popped up on earth pretty quickly, give or take a few hundred million years. But intelligence has arrived only in the last few hundred thousand. The chemistry of life is the easy part, but a high IQ much harder.

Of course, there is intelligence and intelligence. Recent research shows that many birds, especially from the crow family, can outdo monkeys on any test of ingenuity. A good case can also be made for octopuses. Given that birds, mammals and molluscs evolved independently, this suggests that some level of intellect is a natural outcome of evolutionary pressures. Still, this is not the kind of intellect that is going to send signals to the stars. Impressive as the crows may be, they aren’t going to work out electromagnetic field theory. Advanced science needs the kind of acumen that allows humans to build complex cultures and probe into things. And this does look like a freak in evolutionary terms.

So, from a biological point of view, it looks as if the prospects for intelligent interstellar conversation are limited. There are probably plenty of dumb animals scattered across the universe, but nobody worth talking to. This might strike you as depressing. However, as Davies points out, it would be more depressing if it turns out that we are not cosmic freaks. For then the silence starts to look sinister. If the emergence of advanced civilisations is common, then the obvious explanation is that a typical extraterrestrial empire doesn’t last long. Perhaps plenty have announced their presence, only to implode within a few years. We all like to think humanity will survive into the indefinite future. But there is a danger that any species with our technological power will quickly find a way of destroying itself, whether by war, pestilence or pollution.

Theories about alien life forms can easily collapse into speculation, and Davies is not immune to the temptation. Some of the topics he explores verge on the fanciful. Might the aliens send probes to seed our planet with viruses? Does the future of intelligence lie with machines, and if so what will they care about? Still, Davies never lets his enthusiasm run away with him. His attitude is that of a rational physicist, and he is careful to mark the difference between established theory and exploratory guesswork. In an area more given to fabulation than fact, this level-headedness is positively refreshing. If you ever start worrying about why no one is talking to us, this is the book to calm you down.

David Papineau is professor of philosophy of science at King’s College London

The writer, comedian and original lad has moved in and out of the spotlight over the years. His controversial new comic movie will ensure he’s centre stage once more

As cameras rolled on the set of the new film comedy The Infidel, the screenwriter could be spotted hunched over a state-of-the-art laptop in a dark corner. Director Josh Appignanesi was intrigued. “It is a bit late to alter the script,” he called over. But far from refining comic dialogue for the actors working around him, David Baddiel was deep into his next project. “I am working on my depressing novel,” came the reply.

For around 20 years now, the 45-year-old writer has darted in and out of popular consciousness like a restless moth. Here is a man who longs to shelter in obscurity just when he is faced with the glare of publicity and who, conversely, is never more keen to get back into the limelight than when he has been skulking around his intellectual hinterland for a while.

Well, Baddiel had better brace himself again. The publicity surrounding his new film, coupled with a plan to bring back his hit football song, Three Lions, for the World Cup this summer, are thrusting him to the fore once more.

The Infidel walks a tricky line between topicality and good, old-fashioned British farce. It tells the story of an adopted Muslim who suddenly discovers he was born a Jew. With Omid Djalili cast as the lead and with cameo roles for Matt Lucas and Richard Schiff from The West Wing, the film has already created enough fuss to have Baddiel twitching on Twitter about the outcome of a recent photo-shoot. “Looking again like a blind tramp,” he tweeted last week. “It seems to be a look I’m cultivating.” But don’t be misled. Old friends at Cambridge University remember Baddiel as a student who was just as confident about his style as he was about his academic prowess.

“He was very Joy Division, sitting around in a long, dark coat with floppy hair,” remembers one contemporary, while another speaks of his unique ability to be “hugely impressive while also being faintly ridiculous because he had huge hair, like the punk poet John Cooper Clarke, and yet took himself very seriously and was very left wing”.

Performing as a teenage stand-up and eventually becoming vice-president of Footlights, the young Baddiel was clearly firing on all cylinders, gaining a double first in English. Even after graduating, well into his career, the comedian was studying for an as-yet-unfinished Phd on the Victorian sexualisation of children.

Baddiel grew up the middle one of three brothers in north London. His Jewish parents were from orthodox families and, although his father turned against religion, Baddiel was sent to a Jewish primary school and went from Hebrew lessons on to a conventional bar mitzvah.

Back then, his hairstyle also seems to have featured prominently. Some former pupils at Haberdashers’ Aske’s boys’ school are fairly sure they remember him sporting a mohican. They certainly remember his part in the lower sixth’s end-of-term revue. “It was vitriolic,” said one. “It was particularly cruel about a head librarian I remember. It was chaos, in fact. And there was never another revue after that.”

Although the adolescent Baddiel soon “got into punk and communism”, his novels and his comedy have regularly drawn on his suburban Jewish roots. His first novel, Time for Bed, was a thoughtful contemplation on north London life, wrongly billed by publicists as a celebrity blockbuster. Critic Tony Parsons said: “One of the best things I have ever read about the nature of mad, obsessive love… funny, sad and horribly, painfully true.” Baddiel went on to write two other books, Whatever Love Means, and The Secret Purposes, an examination of the wartime internment of German Jewish refugees on the Isle of Man.

The Jewish theme surfaces again in the new film where a burning skull cap is pivotal to the plot. Djalili was sold on the project, he says, after just a few words from Baddiel: “If brevity is the soul of wit, David must have given me the greatest film pitch ever. I think he used four words, ‘Muslim becomes a Jew’.”

Appignanesi was reeled in more slowly: “I moved in down David’s road and he had seen a film I had made that he half-hated and half-loved. He showed me his script, which was called God’s Windows then and was a little more serious, especially at the end. I effectively became the script editor first.”

Appignanesi found Baddiel more generous and open than many writers, although there were tense times on set: “We had our moments inevitably. I used to lose my temper, but when you do that you are always the loser. David just looks all disappointed and sad. And there’s nothing you can do. He speaks his mind very clearly and doesn’t tend to change it.”

Baddiel, who says he has been in therapy for eight years, claims to have a great fear of anger and confrontation. He has spoken of an unspecific dread of his father in childhood, which is hard to fathom when we learn that Baddiel Senior dealt in Dinky toys. (Curiously, his mother had a complimentary commercial interest in novelty golfing memorabilia.)

Whatever his abiding personal issues, the upshot is that Baddiel seems keen not to offend. Even when making a film that tackles attitudes to Islam and Judaism, the writer is hoping to please, asking a Muslim comedian to check his script for unintended slights.

“He is one of the nicest people I know. Very sociable,” said Djalili, who has known the writer for four years now and describes himself as a jealous Salieri to Baddiel’s Mozart. “He is either like my loving elder brother or else a ‘high-status Jew’; if he speaks you listen. A lot of stars have attention deficit disorder and he is not one of those.”

One working relationship that may never be salvaged, however, is Baddiel’s one-time comedy partnership with Rob Newman. After finding fame with Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis in the cult hit The Mary Whitehouse Experience, the double act played huge venues on their way to a high-profile Wembley Arena gig in 1993. It was the original “rock’n'roll” moment for comedy. But by this point the two stars were only speaking to each other intermittently and a blistering row over a ruined punchline ended their collaboration.

“Dave and Rob had met as scriptwriters on a Radio 1 cabaret show, hosted by Patrick Marber, and that’s why they were put together,” remembers Punt. “When we first worked on the radio version of Mary Whitehouse it was more of a team thing. Dave was easy to write with, though Rob had a more personalised style.”

Baddiel was ambitious from the beginning, adds Punt, and enjoyed their success. “He mellowed a lot when he became famous and he moved into the celebrity world without any apparent effort. The BBC wanted a third series of Mary Whitehouse, but Dave wanted to go on to do Fantasy Football with Frank Skinner.”

This was the television show, presented in a studio recreation of the bachelor flat Baddiel and Skinner shared for six years, that set the tone for the “lads’ comedy” of the mid-90s. Stuck between the revolutionary era of alternative comics, such as Alexei Sayle and Ben Elton, and the current batch of Hollywood crossover stars, such as Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais and Steve Coogan, this “laddishness” now seems a pretty domesticated beast.

These days, Baddiel is relatively domesticated too. He shares his home with Morwenna Banks, the comic actress, and their two children, Dolly, eight, and Ezra, five, although a close friendship with the saucy comedian Russell Brand (now engaged himself) speaks of a continued vicarious interest in the bachelor world.Which lurid suggestion brings us back to the new book that was being worked on in a dark corner of the film set.

The Death of Eli Gold sounds like a mature approach to the author’s proud preoccupation with notions of masculinity and male sexual appetites. It tells of the demise of a great cultural figure, a Bellow or a Roth, and its impact on his children and wives.

Due out in September, the thriller tackles primal urges the writer has often talked about. A former proponent of the joys of porn, Baddiel once confessed his strong desire to have sex every day and he still advocates a “fight against the dying of that light” in every long-term relationship.

But the demanding life of the priapic and promiscuous star is not for him. “There’s always an element of emotional damage,” he has warned. The lure of a bit of recondite literary research in a shady corner has proved much harder to resist for this on-again-off-again celebrity.

In the wake of his father’s death, Rupert Thomson returned to the family home to live there with his brothers. But slowly their relationship deteriorated, becoming more sinister by the day

On 7 July 1964, my mother died suddenly, aged 33. My brother, Robin, and I were at school that day. We went to lessons. We had lunch. We didn’t know. When school finished, we walked home. It was hot, and I could smell grass cuttings and the tar melting at the edge of the road. I was eight and Robin, who was five, lagged behind as usual. I arrived at the house ahead of him, but stopped at the gate. My uncle’s Jaguar was parked in front of our garage. I glanced back down the hill. Robin was still 100 yards away, socks around his ankles, cap askew. He looked exhausted and fed up – the long walk home was the part of the day he dreaded most – but when I shouted that Uncle Roland had come to visit, his face brightened and he speeded up.

I waited until he reached the gate, then we both ran up the drive. The back door was open. The house felt cool. Through the kitchen, across the hall. On into the sitting room. Then darkness suddenly, and silence. I seem to remember shadowy figures at the edges of the room.

A Wednesday morning, 20 years later. I am living in West Berlin. The phone rings.

“Rupert?” It’s Robin. “Dad’s in hospital,” he says. “He’s having trouble breathing.”

My heart lurches. “I’ll fly over.”

During the war, my father served in the North Atlantic, but in 1943, at the age of 21, he caught pneumonia. He spent the next 10 years in hospital and was subjected to several major operations. He has always dreaded having to go back.

The next morning the phone rings again.

Robin says my name. Then he says, “Dad’s dead.”

“Have you spoken to Ralph?” I ask. Ralph is our other brother – the youngest of the three.

“Not yet.”

The following day I catch a plane to England. I take a taxi from Eastbourne station and in no time we’re outside the house. Half-hidden by yew trees, it has a withdrawn or injured look. The windows are blank; it has been dark for hours, but Robin hasn’t thought to draw the curtains. Though my father has just died, what the house reminds me of, as always, is the absence of my mother.

I stand by the front door of the house where I grew up. My life in West Berlin already feels unreal. I knock loudly.

The door opens. Before I can speak, Robin leans close and whispers, “Ralph and Vivian are here.” I stare at him. Ralph, my brother, and his wife.

“They arrived this morning,” Robin says in the same dramatic whisper. “They’re moving in.”

All day, I have been imagining Robin and I would have the house to ourselves. Once the funeral was over, we would stay up until dawn, drinking and talking, listening to music. At weekends, there would be parties, with people driving down from London. It would be a last wild farewell to the place where everything began. If Ralph and Vivian are living with us, though, there will be constraints.

As I step over the threshold, Robin grins. “We’ve been opening Dad’s wine.”

I follow him into the kitchen. Ralph is sitting where Dad used to sit, at the head of the table. The air is tense, smoky. I pour myself a glass of wine from the open bottle and light a cigarette. I tell them that what has happened hasn’t really sunk in yet. It all just seems so unbelievable. There are nods. Ralph and Vivian reach for their own cigarettes. The atmosphere loosens a notch.

And suddenly all four of us are smoking, even though no one has ever lit up in the house before. Dad attributed his lung problems to cigarettes, and to be smoking now feels disrespectful, even risky, and my eyes keep flicking towards the door, afraid he might appear at any moment.

From time to time Vivian goes upstairs to check on Greta, who is six months old. Ralph and Vivian have a baby. That, too, seems unbelievable.

Vivian hardly opens her mouth all evening. She keeps her eyes on Ralph, and if she does speak, she speaks to him.

I ask where everyone is sleeping. Ralph says he has taken “Paradise”, so called because its window looks towards Paradise Wood; the word has been on the door for as long as I can remember. Robin tells me he is using Dad’s room. Unwilling to start searching for clean sheets, I decide to share Dad’s double bed with Robin.

A few days later, I wake to the sound of hammering. I turn my head. Robin is fast asleep beside me.

The banging stops, then starts again, even louder than before. I pull on trousers and a shirt. Robin groans and hauls himself upright. Opening Dad’s door, I step out on to the landing. With Robin at my shoulder, I peer round the corner. Outside Paradise is a man in paint-stained overalls. I say hello. The man glances round in a casual, almost insolent manner. Set into the door behind him is a lock the size of a fist, its bright brass standing out against the ancient varnish.

Robin and I retreat to Dad’s room.

“It seems a bit extreme,” I say, “don’t you think?”

“Maybe they’re frightened.”

“What of?”

Robin shrugs. “Us, I suppose.”

Ralph and Vivian met in 1979, during their first term at London University, and quickly became inseparable. When I first knew them as a couple, I was also living in London with my girlfriend Tina. Ralph and I had motorbikes, and Tina and Vivian rode pillion. The four of us would go out. But then, almost overnight, Ralph and Vivian stopped calling, and the next time they moved they didn’t give us their address.

A few months later, Dad told me Ralph and Vivian were always moving from one flat to another; he couldn’t keep up with the changes of address.

In that same phone call, he told me he would hear them walking around his house in the middle of the night. He had no idea how they got in. He thought they were taking things. He wanted to ask them what they were doing, but was afraid to leave his room. By morning, he said, they would usually be gone. It was Dad’s belief that Ralph had undergone a profound change since meeting Vivian, and he had taken to calling her “Svengali”.

The silence was finally broken in the spring of 1981 by the arrival of a letter. Ralph had written to tell me that he and Vivian were planning to get married and to ask if I would be his best man. Not having seen him or even spoken to him for more than a year, I felt as though a chasm had opened up between us. I had heard that he had become a Catholic – he had spent time in a monastery, apparently. I wrote back saying that he should find somebody else. A best man ought to be close to the groom, I said, and since we had fallen out of touch, I was unequal to the role.

When the wedding day came, Robin wore a green tweed suit he had bought from a charity shop. Borrowed from Dad, my own suit smelled acridly of mothballs. My hair was dyed red, Robin’s bleached a curious whitish-yellow. Naively, perhaps, we were unprepared for the reception we received, which veered from coldness and suspicion to outright hostility. Vivian’s relatives were convinced we were against the marriage, and our family’s meagre turnout did nothing to dislodge that belief. Dad had stayed at home. There was no sign of my stepmother, Sonya, and their children, Rosie and Halliday. Tina wasn’t invited – lending weight to her feeling she was somehow to blame for our rift.

Now here we are back in the house again. The whole setup’s unusual. I’ve never heard of anybody doing what we’re doing. A father dies. His three sons return to the family home, start living there. Sometimes I have the feeling we’re made up – characters in a story. We’re like children again, but with no parents. We’re on our own, and completely in the dark.

I walk downstairs one morning to find the kitchen door ajar. A mysterious, repetitive scraping is coming from inside. Vivian is bent over the table, her right elbow working rhythmically. Greta is sitting in a high chair. Pushing the door open, I peer over Vivian’s shoulder. In her left hand is Dad’s grindstone, but the knife she’s sharpening isn’t one I recognise. She speaks before I can frame a question.

“It’s a flick knife,” she says. “Ralph’s got one, too.”

“What for?” I say.

“So we can defend ourselves.”

That evening, in the sitting room, Ralph reaches into his pocket and pulls out an identical knife.

“Jesus, Ralph,” I say, “you’re dangerous.”

His eyes lift from the blade. He smiles.

On the morning of the funeral, I wake up to see Robin bent over the sink in the corner of the bedroom, vomiting. I remember Dad telling me how Robin kept being sick on the day our mother died. Both sides of the church are filled with people we know. Uncle Frank and Auntie Miriam. Uncle Roland. Sonya, Rosie and Halliday. My ex, Tina. I look at Robin and Ralph, and they look back at me. Whatever binds us seems to tighten.

But after the funeral we divide into two separate camps – myself and Robin; and Ralph, Vivian and Greta. Since Ralph and Vivian never seem to do anything as individuals, we have started calling them “the Unit”. Moving through the house, I begin to notice spaces. On mantelpieces or windowsills. In drawers. I keep thinking, there used to be something there – didn’t there?

One morning, I find Robin cooking. I lean on the sink and gaze at the dustbins. As usual, they are full to overflowing.

“I think things are disappearing.”

His eyes narrow. “The Unit.”

The next day Robin and I set off up to London to a club called the Batcave. I wear my black oilskin, greasepaint, kohl. Robin’s 16-hole Doc Martens and baggy mohair jumper are topped off with a blond mohican. The place smells toxic, chemical: hairspray, hydrogen peroxide, cigarettes. From the speakers comes the chain-saw snarl and vicious bass thump of Alien Sex Fiend. A fiver buys me what I need. I take Robin into the ladies. We lock ourselves in a stall and chop lines of speed on top of the cistern. My heart begins to rattle like a stone in a tin can. The drugs are kicking in.

That week, I move into the au pairs’ room. I have a single bed and a pink wardrobe, where the au pairs used to hang their dresses. A protocol emerges. Robin and I sleep late, allowing the Unit to have their breakfast uninterrupted. As soon as Ralph leaves for work, Vivian shuts herself in Paradise with Greta, and Robin and I don’t see her after that.

One morning when I push the kitchen door open, Ralph and Vivian are at the table. Ralph seems utterly absorbed by what Vivian is telling him. I fetch a bowl of Weetabix and sit down.

“You’re going to die when you’re 45,” Vivian says in a soft voice.

“Oh.” Ralph looks crestfallen, but his eyes don’t leave her face.

She reaches out and puts a hand on his. “Sorry.”

“So when am I going to die, then?” I ask.

Vivian turns to me and takes a long pull on her cigarette. She considers me for perhaps 10 seconds. “When you’re 58,” she says.

“Great,” I say. “Thanks for that.”

I glance at Ralph and we exchange a rueful smile. Robin comes in and wants to know how long he’s got. Vivian doesn’t even bother turning round: “72,” she says.

We all burst out laughing – except Vivian. She seems distracted, even absent, and I remember how Dad would refer to her as Svengali. He claimed Ralph had been brainwashed, but now I’m sharing a house with Ralph and Vivian, I’m not convinced he was right. I think Ralph might have engineered the change himself. As soon as he left home, he was on the lookout for somebody to be with for ever. He couldn’t wait to cast off the person he had been – that almost pitifully affectionate little boy who became attached to every au pair Dad employed and was repeatedly abandoned. He had to make sure that never happened again.

The following weekend, Robin and I have our first big fire, disposing of all the rubbish that the dustmen have refused to deal with. The flames leap so high that they char the branches of a nearby apple tree. A column of oily smoke rises from the rubber underlay of the carpet.

In his will, Dad split his estate five ways, though such moneys as our half-sister and half-brother stand to inherit are to be put into a trust until they are 18. In the letter accompanying it, Dad assumes we will be keeping the house in the family, and though Ralph has been considering the idea – it’s a good place to bring up children – he doubts he will be able to borrow enough to buy myself and Robin out. We ring a firm of estate agents; within 10 days the sale is agreed. Though this is the news I have been waiting for – the main obstacle to my leaving Eastbourne has been removed – I retreat to my bedroom and stare out over the garden. Three generations of my mother’s family lived here. In selling the house, we’ll not only be disregarding my father’s wishes. We’ll be disposing of my mother’s history, and our own.

On the last Monday in June 1984, I go on holiday. On my first morning back, Robin tells me that Ralph sold Dad’s desk while he, Robin, was visiting friends in Lewes. He says he’d had his eye on the desk for ages. Although I sympathise, the desk doesn’t affect me. But then he mentions that Ralph has also sold the Braque lithograph that used to hang above the fireplace in Dad’s bedroom.

“It would have been better to keep it in the family,” I say to Ralph, when he returns from work.

“It seemed like a fair price.” Ralph doesn’t look guilty, let alone apologetic.

“I wish you’d asked.”

“You weren’t here.”

“You could have waited till I got back. I liked that picture. I wanted to keep it.”

“Look, we had to make some progress. We have to sell everything that has any value, otherwise the will won’t go to probate before we move out of the house.” Ralph pauses. “Anyway, I don’t think it was very good. I couldn’t even tell what it was.”

“It was a Braque,” I say.

I see a side of Ralph I haven’t seen before. He has a ruthless streak. Is he relishing the fact that he has outmanoeuvred me? Or is he merely thinking I have brought this on myself? Robin and I have been content to let Ralph assume responsibility. It’s Ralph who has been doing all the work.

The lithograph has gone, I tell myself. Things of great value are always disappearing, never to be seen again. Things I love. Well, perhaps I’m not supposed to have them. Perhaps I should stop trying to hold on. After all, how much of the past does anybody really need to keep?

One night, Robin and I decide to sample a few of Dad’s pills. We take red ones, yellow ones, grey-green ones, red-and-white capsules that remind me of a toadstool. Fifteen, maybe more. We lose count.

“What if we both pass out?”

“They’ll find us in the morning. It’ll be like one of those suicide pacts.”

“No note, though.”

“I can’t be bothered,” Robin says at last.

“Nor can I,” I say.

The TV is on. During the weather forecast, the weatherman is replaced by Dad. “I’m sorry he died all alone, with none of us there,” I say.

“I think about that.”

“I can’t cry about him yet,” I say, “not properly. I don’t know why. I just can’t.”

I haven’t even begun to grieve. It’s the same as 20 years ago. Like water through limestone, this new sorrow is following the path formed by the old one, both sorrows hidden, buried, unexpressed.

I wake up wearing all my clothes. Robin is asleep beside me. The lights are still on. So is the TV, its blank screen hissing. I turn the TV off, then put my ear close to Robin’s mouth. His breath smells of plastic, but his breathing sounds regular enough.

For months now, we have known that we need to empty the house, but there are still tables and chairs in every room. We have contacted all the antiques dealers in town, and all the charity and junk shops. We can’t even give it away.

One Saturday, after Vivian has taken Greta up to bed, we sit in the kitchen, drinking. We have decided to go through Dad’s collection of LPs. We put on Françoise Hardy Sings About Love. As Robin turns the record over, he leans on the radiogram and one of the front legs gives slightly. We’re all having the same thought. Ralph tugs at the leg, which comes away quite easily. Wrenching the turntable free, Robin carries it out to the pile of scrap metal by the garage. There’s a silence, then a decisive crash. He reappears dusting his hands on his trousers.

Our eyes sweep the room. We make for the scullery, where Dad keeps all his tools. Robin selects a short-handled axe. Ralph lifts a saw down off the wall. I reach for the claw hammer. We return to the kitchen. Before we begin, Robin rigs up his stereo and puts on another of Dad’s LPs, Grand Prix, a recording of formula one racing cars in action. We set to work dismembering the furniture. The chopping and hacking is so loud that we have to turn the volume up. One by one, the cars snarl by. Lotus, Vanwall. BRM. Every now and then, we stop for a glass of cider or a smoke.

When we have finished with the radiogram, the kitchen table and chairs, we fetch furniture from the study and the sitting room. Swinging with a little too much vigour, Robin misses a table leg and his axe bites hungrily into the parquet floor.

It’s midnight when I next look up. The rubble’s a foot deep, and there’s red stuff on the fridge. I wonder if it’s blood. My breath rasps. Overhead, a naked bulb sways on its flex. Ralph sprawls face down, passed out on a heap of splintered wood. I bend over him. “Ralph? Are you all right?”

His lips move, he isn’t dead. Where’s Robin, though? As I try to piece things together, a howl comes from another part of the house. In the glasshouse Robin is standing, legs apart, in front of a squat upholstered chair, the short-handled axe raised high above his head. “I’ve always hated this chair,” he says. He brings the axe down on one of the arms. The chair’s arm splits, but doesn’t yield.

“Fuck.” He drains his glass of cider.

As Robin prepares to deliver yet another savage blow, a movement distracts me. Someone is standing on the lawn.

“Robin,” I say, “we’re not alone.”

As Robin turns, his axe still raised, a figure steps forward into the light. He’s wearing a dark uniform with shiny buttons.

“This party’s got to stop,” he says.

I stifle a laugh. “This isn’t a party,” I tell him. “It’s just the family. We live here.”

“There have been complaints…” the policeman says. “About the noise.”

“We’ll be quiet now,” I say.

“You do that.” The policeman backs away and disappears through the garden gate.

“He was young for a policeman,” Robin says.

“Yes, he was.”

“He seemed nervous.”

I look at Robin. “Can you blame him?”

Robin lowers his axe.

At the end of 2005, I visited Uncle Frank and Auntie Miriam with my wife, Kate, and my daughter, Evie. For the past 20 years, Frank had been the only member of our family Ralph had been prepared to deal with. Frank told me that he had spent a day with Ralph and Vivian before they left for China. China? He’s got a new job, Frank said, in Shanghai.

Frank showed me half a dozen snaps he’d taken of Ralph and his family. The sky was a deep, flawless blue – the blue of childhood skies, the blue of the past – and Ralph was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and loose white trousers, exactly the sort of clothes he had worn during the summer of 1984. Ralph’s hair had been receding, now he was almost completely bald. He was pale, too. Kate said he looked like someone who didn’t have long to live. With a jolt, I remembered Vivian giving him until he was 45. I did a rapid mental calculation: Ralph had celebrated his 45th birthday three months ago! I didn’t take Vivian’s prediction seriously, but all the same…

There were Ralph’s children, three of whom I’d never seen. These were my nephews and nieces, yet I didn’t even know their names. I hadn’t set eyes on Ralph since 1984, but my last contact had been in 1987. Sonya had asked us to release some money from the trust we had set up for Rosie and Hal. As executors of Dad’s will, we needed to sign the appropriate forms, but neither Robin nor I knew where Ralph lived. I tracked him down to a bank in the City, where he was working.

His first words were, “How did you get this number?” He seemed on the point of hanging up. At the end of the call, he told me not to ring him again. If I wanted to make contact, I should do so in writing. Shocked by the formality – the finality – of what he was saying, I laughed. But over the years I had abided by his ruling, I hadn’t called, I hadn’t even written.

Now, a few months after visiting Uncle Frank, I wrote to Ralph. The last time I had talked to Kate about the idea of getting in touch with him, she had said, you know, you really should have agreed to be his best man. She could never believe I had turned him down. If I was finally writing to Ralph, though, it wasn’t out of guilt. While examining the photographs, a thought had occurred to me, and I decided to put that thought straight into the letter. It would be strange, wouldn’t it, I said, if we were to die without ever setting eyes on each other again? Yes, I might want to try to unravel the mystery of our estrangement, and I might even feel the need to apologise to him, but the urge simply to see him outweighed all that. He was living in Shanghai, I said, which was a place I had always longed to visit. If I were to happen to pass through the city at some point in the future, would he meet me for a drink?

The day after posting the letter, I flew to Australia, and when I returned home two weeks later I found an envelope in my letterbox. Dear Rupert, it began. Wow – that was a surprise. The tone was sincere, and friendly, so much so that I fell to wondering why the estrangement had lasted as long as it had. A correspondence began. There would be days, even weeks, between emails. At least the lines of communication were open, though. Ralph’s personality would shift from offbeat to businesslike – I had no real purchase on it – but what didn’t seem to be in any doubt was his willingness to see me.

I arrived in Shanghai in December 2007 and went to Ralph’s office to meet him for lunch. We gave each other a hug. I felt a brief shudder, as though we had been caught in a minor earthquake. I couldn’t tell where it had come from – him, or me, or both of us.

I passed Ralph photographs of Kate and Evie. It seemed important that he should look at them and know who I had become. I told him I had spoken to Sonya recently for the first time in years, and that it had shocked her to learn that I had a wife and daughter. She had assumed I would always be alone, describing me as “a little bit separated”.

On our way to lunch, Ralph kept snatching glances at me, and I thought I saw amusement on his face, and disbelief. The restaurant Ralph had chosen was enormous and grandiose. We drank fast and chain-smoked. Our conversation jumped from subject to subject, often halfway through a sentence. Something hallucinogenic was happening: whenever I took my eyes off Ralph, I found that I couldn’t remember what he looked like, and even if I stared at him, his face would alter, reverting to how it had been when he was nine or 10, a time when I had known him well.

“I’m glad you came,” Ralph said. “I’m glad you got in touch. I’m not sure I ever would have.

“Ask me a question,” Ralph said.

“What was I like?”

“What were you like?” He stared straight ahead, “That’s a good one.

“You were very close to Robin. You seemed obsessed with him.”

“Obsessed?”

“There was this whole thing of sleeping together – in Dad’s bed.”

“I suppose it was the only bed that was made up when I arrived.”

Ralph gave me a look I couldn’t interpret.

“We thought you were having a sexual relationship,” Ralph said.

I stared at him.

“We didn’t judge,” he said. “You know, we thought, ‘Well, if that’s what’s going on, it’s cool.’”

“You thought we were having sex?”

“Yes.” He looked at me. “Weren’t you?”

“No.” I had spoken more loudly than I’d meant to.

“You were always together,” Ralph went on. “You just wanted to be with him all the time. You were infatuated.”

I looked at him. “No.”

The thought of having sex with Robin had never even entered my head. I looked at him. He held my gaze.

“No.”

He looked away, but didn’t seem convinced.

Startled by his answer to my first question, I jumped straight to the next one. What had been the cause of our original estrangement in 1980? Had I said or done something, or was it Tina?

“You don’t remember? It was Tina,” he said. “She said she really wanted to paint Vivian because it was always much more interesting to paint people who weren’t beautiful.”

“She said that?”

“Vivian thought, fuck you. She didn’t want to have anything to do with Tina after that.”

I suspected Tina had said – or meant to say – that she liked painting people who weren’t obviously beautiful – coming from Tina, this would have been a compliment, but there was little point in trying to explain this to Ralph 27 years later.

“So that’s why you stopped seeing us?” I said.

He nodded. “Yes.”

“And then I refused to be your best man. That must have made things worse…”

“I suppose it was a bit of a blow. But, you know – blokes: we get over things like that. Women are different.” Ralph allowed himself a crumpled grin.

I said I was sorry, but at the time we had no idea of who he was, or where he was living. I told him I had seen them as a version of Bonnie and Clyde – not just in love, but bound up in each other to such an extent that it removed them from society.

They hadn’t wanted anybody to know where they were living, Ralph said. Once, they had invited a friend to dinner. They refused to give him their address, though. Instead, they met him in a pub and blindfolded him, only allowing him to see again when he was inside their flat. He and Vivian had a private language, Ralph said – still did, in fact – and they could often have whole conversations without so much as opening their mouths.

“We wanted our own life,” he said, “with no one interfering.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“I mean, I like you – and I like Robin. It’s just that I like Vivian more.”

I fell silent. It seemed that Ralph had got as close to explaining our estrangement as it was possible to get.

That night, as I sat in my hotel room, I thought how unlikely it was that one tactless remark from Tina, a girl I hadn’t lived with in a quarter of a century, could trigger such a long estrangement. Neither my wife nor my daughter had ever seen Ralph. For my daughter, especially, Ralph was a ghost figure, a kind of rumour: she would laugh gaily at the mention of his name, as though I were talking about someone imaginary. I wondered if, in years to come, she would meet him.

Though exhausted, I couldn’t seem to sleep for more than four hours at a stretch. When I called Ralph on Thursday to confirm another lunch, he said that he, too, had been having trouble sleeping.

At the restaurant we’d had a conversation about the perfect murder. We had agreed that there were moments when an ideal opportunity seems to present itself. At our next meeting, I had a question for Ralph. “When we were in Eastbourne,” I said slowly, “did you ever think about killing me and Robin?”

Ralph said he and Vivian had thought about it ”for about a week”. I laughed despite myself.

Ralph said that they had thought about doctoring the brakes on Robin’s old Volvo, then suggesting a trip to Beachy Head, which was a place that Robin and I seemed fond of.

Obviously, he and Vivian had found it hard living with us, I said, but they seemed to have arrived with preconceived notions. Why else would they have had a Chubb lock fitted on their door right at the beginning? They’d had the lock fitted, Ralph said, because Robin and I had walked in on Vivian when she was asleep in bed. We had poked around in their private things. Made all sorts of derogatory remarks. I found myself staring at Ralph again.

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember,” he said.

As he spoke, I had a vision of Robin in Paradise. He was wearing his overcoat, and hunched over furtively in the corner by the cupboard. I saw him send a sharp glance to his left. Christ, he hissed, she’s in here. Quick! He meant we should leave the room – though by then, of course, it was already too late. I shook my head. “Were we drunk?”

“I don’t know. It happened during the day, I was at work. We only had the lock fitted after that.”

“Vivian really hated being in that house,” he went on. “You kept drugs in the larder, next to our food. We didn’t do drugs.”

I brought up the story Dad had told me about Ralph breaking into the house in the middle of the night. Was that true?

“Yes, I think so,” he said.

He had ridden down to Eastbourne with Vivian, but Dad disapproved of her so strongly that he’d had to smuggle her into the house. They hadn’t taken anything, though.

“I’m sorry to go on about it,” I said when our drinks arrived, “but I still don’t understand what happened, why we lost touch so completely.”

I reminded him of what he had said when we last spoke, in 1987. Don’t phone me again. If you want to contact me, do it in writing.

“You took me very literally,” Ralph said quietly.

“What did you expect?” I said.

Ralph lit a cigarette. His face had taken on a strange, blurred expression, as if a long estrangement wasn’t something he had ever intended or envisaged, and not before time, perhaps, I saw my own part in it quite clearly. I had always assumed that it was Ralph who had severed ties with the family. Was I really all that different, though? I had felt so put upon that I had needed to get as far away as possible. All the places I had lived in: Athens, Berlin, New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Sydney, Amsterdam, Rome… That couldn’t just be curiosity, could it? Then there was Sonya’s telling use of the word “separated”…

That night, we drank vodka and played pool. I lost all sense of time, but it didn’t bother me how late it got. I was with my brother; there was nowhere I would rather be. At six in the morning, out on the street, Ralph and I stood facing in different directions. As he began to tell me that he should be going home, his mobile rang. He put it to his ear. “What are you doing awake?” he said. I knew then that Vivian was on the other end. “No, it’s been fine,” he said. “It’s been lovely.”

It felt strange to have Vivian’s voice so close, and to know that she would have nothing to do with me. Was what had happened in 1984 so terrible that not even 23 years were enough to wipe it out? A wave of regret swept through me, and I walked a few paces up the street. Cars surged by. Soon it would be light.

We caught a taxi. These were our last seconds. We hugged briefly, then he got out. As the taxi pulled away, I turned and peered through the back window. Ralph was walking at the edge of the wide road, diminishing rapidly. As the distance opened up between us, as he was swallowed by the murky grey-brown of a Shanghai dawn, love caught me unawares, reaching out through the back window of the taxi like a line thrown from my heart. This love was unconditional; he could do whatever he wanted with it. Even nothing. Nothing was fine. But I would be there for him if he ever needed me. He could call on me. Rely on me. There would be no more letters saying no.

• Some names have been changed.

This is an edited extract from This Party’s Got To Stop, by Rupert Thomson, published by Granta at £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99, with free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop.