Rawcliffe shook his head in a fuddled gesture, the Frascati having wakened the sleeping Strega. ‘What I mean is, Enderby, that you’re bloody lucky to be writing poetry at all at the age of – what is your age?’

‘Forty-Five.’

‘At the age of forty-five, Enderby. What I mean is, what are you looking forward to now? Eh?’ He let more Frascati stagger into his glass. Outside, the Roman daylight flashed and rippled. ‘Don’t kid yourself, my dear boy, about long bloody narrative poems, or plays, or any of that nonsense. You’re a lyric poet, and the time is coming for the lyric gift to die. Who knows? Perhaps it’s died already?’ He looked narrowly at Enderby over the glass flask of Frascati swimming and dancing in his grip. ‘Don’t expect any more epiphanies, any more dawn inspirations, Enderby. That poem of mine, the one in the anthologies, the one I’ll live by if I’m going to live at all, I wrote that bugger, you know, Enderby, at the age of twenty-one. Youth. It’s the only thing worth having.’ He nodded sadly. As in a film, an easy symbol of youth orchestrated his words, passing by outside, a very head-high girl of Rome with black hair and smoky sideburns, thrust breasts, liquid waist like Harry Ploughman’s, animal haunches. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Rawcliffe, ‘youth.’ He drank Frascati and sighed. ‘Haven’t you felt, Enderby, that your gift is dying? It’s a gift appropriate to youth, you know, owing nothing to experience or learning. An athletic gift, really, a sportif gift.’ Rawcliffe dropped his jaw at Enderby, disclosing crooked teeth of various colours. ‘What are you going to do, Enderby, what are you going to do? To the world, of course, all this is nothing. If the world should enter and hear us mourning the death of Enderby’s lyric gift, the world, Enderby, would deem us not merely mad. The would consider us, Enderby, to be, Enderby’ – he leaned forward, hissing – ‘really talking about something else in the guise of the harmless. They would think us, perhaps, to be Communists.’