A few nights before he had made himself high on marihuana. Then he walked into the street, somewhere in Mayfair - ‘you know, Anna, the atmosphere of wealth and corruption, you can smell it. It attracts me. I walk there sometimes and I smell corruption, it excites me.’ He saw a girl on the pavement, and walked straight up to her and said: ‘I think you’re beautiful, will you sleep with me?’ He couldn’t have done this, he said, unless he was high on alcohol or on marihuana. ‘I didn’t think she was beautiful, but she had beautiful clothes, and as soon as I had said it, I thought she was beautiful. She said, quite simply, yes.’ I asked, was she a prostitute? He said, with a calm impatience (as if he’d been expecting me to ask just that question and even willed it), ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’ I was struck by the way he said: It doesn’t matter. Cool, deadly - he was saying: What does it matter about anyone else, I’m talking about me. She said to him: ‘I think you’re handsome, I’d like to sleep with you.’ And of course he is a handsome man, with an alert, vigorous, glossy good looks. But cold good looks. He said to her: ‘I want to do something. I’m going to make love to you, as if I were desperately in love with you. But you mustn’t respond to me. You must just give me sex, and you must ignore what I say. Do you promise?’ She said, laughing: ‘Yes, I promise.’ They went to his room. ‘This was the most interesting night of my life, Anna. Yes, I swear it, do you believe me? Yes, you must believe me. Because I behaved as if I loved her, as if I loved her desperately. And I even believed I did. Because - you must understand this, Anna, loving her was just for that night, the most wonderful thing you can imagine. And so I told her that I loved her, I was like a man desperately in love. But she kept falling out of her role. Every ten minutes I could see her face change and she responded to me like a woman who is loved. And then I had to stop the game and say: No, that’s not what you promised. I love you, but you know I don’t mean it. But I did mean it. For that night I adored her. I have never been so in love. But she kept spoiling it by responding. And so I had to send her away, because she kept being in love with me.’

‘Was she angry?’ I asked. (Because I felt angry, listening, and I knew he wanted me to be angry.)

‘Yes. She was very angry. She called me all kinds of names. But it didn’t matter to me. She called me sadist and cruel - everything like that. But it didn’t matter to me. We had made the pact, she agreed, and then she spoiled everything for me. I wanted to be able to love a woman once in my life without having to give something back in return. But of course it doesn’t matter. I’m telling you this because it doesn’t matter. Do you understand that, Anna?’

‘Did you ever see her again?’