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‘Don’t you disappear on us, Dave,’ Myra said. ‘Make sure you come to the next seminar, yeah? We need guys like you around Critique. You know, like not just academic?’

Reid flushed slightly and then laughed and said, ‘Aye, that’s what I was thinking myself!’ He slung a duffel bag over his shoulder and with a wiping motion of his spread hand waved goodbye.

We heard his desert-boots padding up the stair, the outer door’s Yale click shut. It came to me for the first time that he and I had spent the afternoon competing for Myra’s regard – or she had spent it testing us. (That was how it started: with Myra. And not, as I thought long afterwards, with Annette. For if Myra had gone with Reid from the first, and I with Annette…)

Myra settled her chin in her hands, jiggled her specs and looked at me through them.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘An interesting guy, huh?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Very serious.’

‘I’m not in the mood for serious, right now.’

She looked at me steadily for a moment and smiled and said: ‘Do you want to burn some grass?’

I thought this was some obscure Americanism for sex, and only realised my mistake when she started building an elaborate joint back at her bedsit; but as it turned out I was not that mistaken, after all.

Myra and I didn’t have an affair, more a succession of one-night stands. Ten days that shook the world. Neither of us pretended, but I like to think both of us hoped, that more might come of it. But publicly, to each other, we were being very sophisticated, very cool, very liberated about it.

Then she fell for a Chilean resistance hero with a black moustache, and I was astonished at how angry and jealous and possessive I felt. There was a moment, around three in the morning after the evening that Myra told me how, you know, it was very nice, and she really liked me, but she had quite unexpectedly found her feelings for this Latin Leninist just so powerful, so unlike anything she’d ever experienced before, that, well for a start she was seeing him in, like, five minutes…there was a moment of drinking black coffee from a grubby mug and looking with unbelieving loathing at the ashtray spilling tarry twists of paper while my fingers rolled yet another just to feel the burn on my tongue, when all my circadian rythms troughed at once in an ebb of the blood, a bleeding of the body’s heat, when I felt I never wanted to go again to a bed that didn’t enfold the promise of Myra’s pelvic bones rocking on mine.

And all the time another part of my mind was working away, analysing how absurd it was that this jealousy should be a surprise, and yet another level of my awareness was congratulating myself on being sufficiently stoical and self-understanding to understand that, and to know that this as a straightforward primate emotion which could be borne, and would pass.

I picked up a Pentel and scrawled on a pad: Pleistocene people with looking-glass eyes, so I wouldn’t forget this cloth-eared insight in the morning, and crashed out. Still aching, but suddenly confident I had the measure of jealousy and unexpected, unrequited love.

At the same time as Myra and I were carefully, and in her case successfully, not falling for each other, I’d fallen for Reid. There’s the love that (no thanks to God) now dares to shout its name, and there’s another love that doesn’t know what its name bloody is, and this was it. Our minds came together like magnets, with a clash.

Reid was stocky and dark, with well-proportioned Celtic features; I was tall and wiry, with hair I kept cropped to disguise its thinness even then, and a nose that had always had me cast as a Red Indian when I was a kid. Reid was gauche, I was suave; but Reid’s awkwardness was something he shrugged off, and rose above with a kind of grace, whereas I felt every social occasion a constant test of wits. Reid’s parents were religious – Free Kirk – and had done their best to inculcate the same principles in him; mine were staunch Marxist materialists, but had taken a laissez-faire attitude to my philosophical