When I first saw you, I have to admit, I mistook you for a stranger, perhaps because I had been living on my own for such a long time, a voluntary isolation that was beginning to affect my speech as well as my vision. But then I had a better look at your reflection on the water, rippled by the swan gliding across the pond, and I saw clearly the short hair, the long nose, the familiar coat: we knew each other from somewhere. After a futile year, I had begun to take daily afternoon walks in the park to lessen the torment of loneliness, which was devised to punish the weak of this world, along a route that took me past the pond, where I fed the ducks, past the Hill, past the Edwardian Pergola, stopping to sit briefly on one of the benches dedicated to the dead.

It was a brief encounter. Then I did not see you again for several months, and I was beginning to convince myself that, after all, you were one of the accidental ghosts that roam the park at any time of the day, mystifying the dogs by their ethereal presence, surprising the sleeping anglers and angering the gardeners by trampling all over the flowerbeds, until we bumped into each other again the following spring. Christmas had passed without escape from the despair, watching cartoons and merciless repeats of comedy on television that could not even make amnesiacs laugh. January had not been better either. Work had been slow, and the joy of writing had given way to a routine that was beginning to resemble the life of a pearl diver. Nothing happened in February either, a month invented only to delay the coming of spring, but then in March I had the providential idea to come into town for a matinee. After the play, being too early to return home, I mixed with the twilight crowd, walking with their umbrellas in the rain, going in and out of shops, restaurants, amusement arcades. Then, suddenly, there you were again, splendid and palpable in a shop window, among the sinister mannequins, the clouds of exhaust fumes and the stalls of the street vendors.

At the time I lived on the first floor of a red brick house in North London, in a small flat where the bath was in the kitchen, so that I did the laundry, bathed and washed the dishes in the same water in order to save on expenses. Late every afternoon, the landlady came to inspect the property, going from floor to floor in her army general’s walk, sniffing the air because smoking was strictly forbidden, before paying a visit to her daughter and son-in-law, who stayed in the garden flat. A well-built Frenchwoman, my landlady had been stranded in England after marrying an English wine merchant who died of cirrhosis five years later, leaving her with a daughter and the freehold of the big house. She converted it into flats and since then rented them out to young professionals. Once a month, when she came to collect the rent, she warned me, with her precise French accent that tolerated no dissent, that I am a guest, even though I always paid on time and put the rubbish out every Sunday night, as she had instructed me, the black bin bag tied with a silk ribbon and a thank-you note addressed to the dustmen, who would otherwise not collect it.

This was the world before I met you, and if I had not gone insane I owed it to my tenacity. I had come to London with the intention of becoming a writer, without a contract, without a plan, without even a plot for a book, on the strength of a good word about my stories from someone who soon proved to be more courteous than sincere. I had saved enough money to last me six months and given up a good job, an easy decision because that job meant nothing to me. Convinced I was destined for greater things, I had shaken hands with my boss, a thin man with tired eyes, a captain’s beard and a northern accent, who had sent me away with his blessing: ‘You’re fucking crazy.’ I moved in a flat in North London and shut myself off from the world, hoping that inspiration would save me from the foretold fate of aspiring writers. A year later my optimism had all but run out, and I had been left with a growing fear that I was wasting my time. I was making ends meet by working a few hours a week in an old bookshop where people seeking shelter from the rain and innocent tourists were cowed into buying first editions of the classics and rare prints made in China a few weeks earlier.

The second time I came across you, that evening in town, I tried speaking to you, but as soon as I turned round you had vanished. I stood in the middle of the torrent of Saturday shoppers, listening to the honking of cars and the blood-curdling shouts of cabbies telling me, inter alia, to get out of the way, and for the first time I felt an oppressive loneliness that I had not felt since my coming to London. Since then I looked for you from the moment I stepped out of the door until I returned home late in the evening, in the park, in the street, at the shops, and kept a diary of unconfirmed sightings, which was soon filled with details of the date, the time and place I thought I saw you. I ate little, just enough to sustain my hope but not my body, and soon I was losing weight. I slept badly, waiting all night for morning to come, when I could leave the house and roam the streets in the rain, without an umbrella, walking for miles, further and further from home each day, and coming back in the evening, tired, disappointed and wet through. I was stopped by the police, dogs barked at me and I earned the reputation of a man one should stay clear of: the Stranger.