By then, Jocelyn was publishing his third. The first had already been made into a movie starring Julie Christie. He’d had a divorce, a mews house in Notting Hill, many interviews on TV, many photographs in life-style magazines. He said hilarious, scathing things about the Prime Minister. He was becoming our generation’s spokesman. But here’s the astonishing thing: our friendship did not falter. Certainly, it became more intermittent. We were busy in our separate realms. We had to get the desk diaries out well in advance in order to see each other. Occasionally, he travelled up to see me and the family. (By the time of our fourth child, we had moved even farther north, to Durham.) But usually I was the one who travelled south to see him and his second wife, Joliet. They lived in a large Victorian house in Hampstead, right near the heath.

Mostly, we drank and talked and walked on the heath. If you’d been listening in, you would have heard nothing between us to suggest that he was the star and that my literary prospects were fading. He assumed that my opinions were as important as his; he never condescended. He even remembered my children’s birthdays. I was always installed in the best guest room. Joliet was welcoming. Jocelyn invited friends around, who all seemed lively and pleasant. He cooked big meals. He and I were, as we often said, “family.”

But, of course, there were differences that neither of us could ignore. My place in Durham was friendly enough, but child-trampled, crowded, cold in the winter. The chairs and carpets had been wrecked by a dog and two cats. The kitchen was always full of laundry, because that was where the washing machine was. The house was afflicted with many ginger-colored pine fittings that we never had time to paint or replace. There was rarely more than one bottle of wine in the house. The kids were fun, but they were chaotic and noisy. We lived on my modest salary and Arabella’s part-time nursing. We had no savings, few luxuries. It was hard in my house to find a place to read a book. Or to find a book.

So it was a holiday of the senses to pitch up at Jocelyn and Joliet’s for a weekend. The vast library, the coffee tables supporting that month’s hardbacks, the expanses of dark polished oak floor, paintings, rugs, a grand piano, violin music on a stand, the banked towels in my bedroom, its awesome shower, the grownup hush that lay around the house, the sense of order and shine that only a daily cleaning lady can bestow. There was a garden with an ancient willow, a mossy Yorkstone terrace, a wide lawn, and high walls. And, more than all this, the place was pervaded by a spirit of open-mindedness, curiosity, tolerance, and a taste for comedy. How could I stay away?

I suppose I should confess to one solitary strain of dark sentiment, a theme of vague unease I never gave expression to. Honestly, it didn’t trouble me that much. I’d written four novels in fifteen years—a heroic achievement, given my teaching load and hands-on fathering and lack of space. All four were out of print. I no longer had a publisher. I always sent a finished copy of my latest to my old friend with a warm dedication. He would thank me for it, but he never passed comment. I’m quite sure that after our Brixton days he never read a word of mine. He sent me early copies of his novels, too—nine to my four. I wrote him long appreciative letters about the first two or three, then I decided for the sake of our friendship’s equilibrium to respond in kind. We no longer talked or wrote about each other’s books—and that seemed fine.

So you find us past midlife, around the age of fifty. Jocelyn was a national treasure, and I—well, it was wrong to think in terms of failure. All my children had processed or were processing through university, I still played a decent game of tennis, my marriage, after a few creaks and groans and two explosive crises, was holding together, and the rumor was that I’d be a full professor within the year. I was also writing my fifth novel—but that was not going awfully well.

And now I come to the core of this story, the seesaw’s crucial tilt. It was early July and I headed from Durham to Hampstead, as I often did straight after marking finals papers. As usual, I was in a state of pleasant exhaustion. But this was not the usual visit. The following day, Jocelyn and Joliet were going to Orvieto for the week and I was going to house-sit—feed their cat, water the plants, and make use of the space and the silence to work on the meandering fifty-eight pages of my novel.

When I arrived, Jocelyn was out running errands and Joliet made me welcome. She was a specialist in X-ray crystallography at Imperial College, a beautiful, sleek woman with a warm, low voice and an intimate manner. We sat drinking tea in the garden, swapping news. And then, with a pause and an introductory frown, as if she had planned the moment, she told me about Jocelyn, how things were not going so well with his work. He’d finished a final draft of a novel and was depressed. It had failed to measure up to his ambitions, for this was supposed to be an important book. He was miserable. He didn’t think he could improve it; nor could he bring himself to destroy it. It was she who’d suggested they take a short holiday and walk the dusty white tracks around Orvieto. He needed rest and distance from his pages. While we sat in the shade of the enormous willow, she told me how downcast Jocelyn had been. She had offered to read the novel, but he had refused—reasonably enough, for she’s not really a literary sort of person.

When she’d finished, I said airily, “I’m sure he can rescue it if he can just get away for a while.”

They set off the following morning. I fed the cat, made myself a second coffee, then spread my pages on a desk in the guest room. The huge, dustless house was silent. But my thoughts kept returning to Joliet’s story. It seemed so odd that my ever-successful friend should have a crisis of confidence. The fact interested me; it even cheered me a little. After an hour, without taking any sort of decision, I wandered toward Jocelyn’s study. Locked. In the same open-minded spirit, I wandered into the master bedroom. I remembered from our Brixton days where he used to keep his marijuana. It didn’t take me long to find the key, at the back of his sock drawer.

You won’t believe this, but I had no plan. I just wanted to see.

On his desk, a huge old electric typewriter hummed—he had forgotten to turn it off. He was among the many word-processing holdouts in the literary world. The typescript was right there, in a neatly squared-off pile, six hundred pages—long, but not vast. The title was “The Tumult,” and underneath I saw, in pencil, “fifth draft,” followed by the previous week’s date.