I had been introduced to Henry through a writer friend of mine who had translated a version of a Genet play and wanted Henry to stage it. Having seen some of Henry’s productions, I went along for the conversation, in the dark bar of a central London hotel, one of those hushed, wood-panelled places that doesn’t seem like it’s in London at all. While Henry was trying to make up his mind whether the time was right for Genet to “reenter our world” (he didn’t think it was, just yet), he made me his friend.

I put it like this because it was sudden. When he fell for you, there were no gaps in the friendship. It was passionate; he began to ring several times a day, or come around uninvited when he had something he needed to talk about. He’d ask me out two or three times a week.

As Josephine liked to point out if I remarked on her indolence, which I often had occasion to do, what people like Henry did most of the time in London was not work but talk about work, as they ate with one another. For them, known as the “chattering classes,” life was a round of breakfasts, brunches, lunches, teas, suppers, dinners and late suppers in the increasing number of new London restaurants. And very agreeable it was. Henry’s activity delighted me; he had no desire for me to replicate him: we were complements.

I discovered that his wife, Valerie, who he was separated from but constantly in touch with, was somewhere close to the centre of the numerous overlapping and intermarrying groups, circles, sets, families and dynasties of semi-bohemian West London. They were all constantly enlarging and moving together through a series of country weekends, parties, prize givings, scandals, suicides and holidays. The children, too, at school and rehab together, married amongst themselves; others employed one another, and their children played together.

Valerie came from a family which had been rich and distinguished for a couple of hundred years. They were art collectors, professors, scholars, newspaper editors. Henry would sometimes say of some full-of-it reprobate, “Oh yes, that’s Valerie’s second cousin by marriage. Better zip it, or you’ll ruin someone’s Christmas.”

He added, “They’re so everywhere, that family, I’d say they were overextended.” Not only were they wealthy, they had a hoard of social capital. They were friends with, and had married into, numerous Guinnesses, Rothschilds and Freuds. The living room contained a Lucian Freud drawing, a Hockney portrait of Valerie and Henry, a Hirst spot painting, a Bruce McLean, a little thing by Antony Gormley, as well as various old and interesting things that you could look at or pick up as you wondered about their history. The house was like a family museum, or body even, indented, scarred and marked everywhere by the years which each new generation was forced to carry with it.

Most nights his crowd went to drinks parties and then to dinner. It was expensive: the clothes, food, drugs, drink, taxis. Not that money was an issue for them. “But it’s like an Evelyn Waugh novel!” Lisa said, going to some trouble never to see any of them again. “He’s one of my favourite writers,” Henry replied. Anyhow, you couldn’t accuse this group of artists, directors and producers, architects, therapists, pop stars and fashion designers of being either indolent or illiberal.

This was privilege, and Henry knew it was. The only way to pay for it was to work, which most of them did. Nor were they particularly dull. Henry just knew them too well. He claimed you could walk into a party in Marrakech or Rio and see the same faces and suffer the same claustrophobia and déjà vu as when you holidayed or visited some art fair or film festival. So, if he was off to a dinner, to a party or opening, he’d want someone new to talk to in the cab or to leave with, after staying a few minutes and finding it dreary. I’d be dragged along, and I was curious too. Anyhow, I was interested to hear what he had to say.

Henry was twelve years older than me, and had been living and working in London all his life; he knew “everyone.” He’d had analysis for two years when his marriage broke up, with a silent, old-school, stern guy who wasn’t as intelligent as him. Henry was interested in therapy, claiming to be “completely fucking messed up,” but not enough to find another analyst. He used me to talk his problems through with, going into the most intimate and serious things right from the start. I liked that about him, but our friendship wasn’t only that.

I’d started my work, of course, with only a few patients, and inadequate ones at that, who refused to let me cure them. I’d also learned from being with Karen that, unless you had cachet, social progress in London could be slow, painful and futile. On occasions, out with Henry, it seemed that everyone else couldn’t wait to kiss and effusively greet one another, while I’d stand in the corner in my best clothes, being ignored even by the waiters.

By now, with Tahir’s words in my head, I was shameless enough to push into others’ conversations; I wasn’t as shy as I used to be, and I’d try to pick up a waitress: the staff was always more attractive than the party-goers and certainly dressed better. Dinner parties were the worst; I’d be stuck beside the neglected wife of the deputy director of a publishing house while everyone else was tucked in satisfactorily next to their greatest friend or greatest fan.

Henry had worked in the theatre since leaving Cambridge and had little experience of such serious condescension; in fact, he didn’t believe it existed. On the other hand, there were others, like Angela Carter, who were not that way. They would remember your name after having met you only once before, and didn’t consider London’s social world to be like a violent version of snakes and ladders.

Valerie hardly noticed me when Henry and I first became friends, though I often went to the house. It was as though she couldn’t quite work out who I was, or why I was there. She was renowned, and had been for a long time, for what was known in London as the “enraptured gaze.” With one elbow on the table, and her chin resting on her fist, she would look directly at you forever, her eyes unblinking, as though you were the pinnacle of fascination. This was an opportunity, among the pompous or frightened, for many monologues, but it could induce, in the more insecure, total collapse or at least a catastrophe of self-doubt.

It wasn’t until I received a good, prominent review in The Observer for Six Characters in Search of a Cure, my first published work, that her eyes enlarged when she saw me, and she came forward to seize my shoulders and slide her lips across my cheeks, leaving a faint pink trace, calling me, at last, her “darling, darling, darling.” Gazed upon, I was in; now I wouldn’t be ejected.

Not at all discombobulated by this abrupt switchback of emotional flow, I doubt whether Valerie troubled to pass her eyes over the book. She herself was on Prozac; for her, Freud’s time had long gone, like Surrealism and the twelve-tone scale. But the book remained in a prime position on her living-room table for a few weeks.

Six Characters had sold well, “considering what it was,” as the publisher said, particularly in paperback. It was said to have even breached the self-help market. A big chunk of the reading population, it turned out, needed help. Apparently people wanted to develop their minds as they did their bodies; they saw the brain as just another muscle, and personal neuroses with a profound history as merely correctable mental dysfunctions.

I gave talks on this stupidity. I was asked to debate Freud’s “fraudulence,” delighted he still had the ability to infuriate. I went on the radio several times, and once on TV, where I was expected to précis my work in a “pithy” paragraph. I was flown to conferences abroad and gave “keynote” speeches. Like a proper writer, I visited bookshops to do signings. I was invited to literary festivals, where I read, was interviewed by Henry, and took questions in a half-empty windy tent. Shortlisted for a couple of prizes, nerve-racked, I had to wear a too-tight dinner jacket with a floppy tie, shine my shoes and attend terrible dinners.

It was worth it: I heard from my next ex, Karen Pearl, again. I’m not sure what image of myself I had created in her head, something of a lost cause I suspect, for she was surprised and intrigued by the “hip young analyst” label. She phoned me, and we began to meet for lunch. After her, at the end of the 80s, in a rush of libidinousness, there had been numerous others, some awkward, some fun, many embarrassing, before I found the unfortunate cure for my restlessness—Josephine. Karen and I had parted more than acrimoniously after two years together. But she had found someone and appeared almost happy.

As for Valerie, when Henry gave her a copy of my book and she saw the name on the cover and was able to say, “I know him, he’s always here,” I became a real person for her, a name with social cachet, one she could pass on.

Valerie was intelligent and decent enough company if you didn’t mind the steady name-dropping (unusually vulgar in someone of her background), as though she were filling your pockets with stones. Her tragedy was the fact that, despite her fuck-you shoes and fuck-me tits, she was plain, and couldn’t help disliking women younger and more beautiful, unless they were well known. But she had made her own way and had shown her worth by becoming a film producer, buying “pleasant enough” novels, putting them with directors and raising the money to make the movies.

Her office was in the basement of the house, and she liked Sam being around so much that she bought him a plasma-screen TV in the hope of keeping him there for good. When he did return to live there, he told her that it was because he’d found Henry “doing something disgusting with a tattooed woman.” Valerie, always content with the piece of Henry she currently was permitted, had said something like “At least it was a woman. How can you make a fuss? Dad’s an artist and he does what he likes. They’re all like that, crazy as bees. Didn’t you see that programme about Toulouse-Lautrec the other day?”

She was smart enough not to complain about Miriam, who she referred to as “Jamal’s sister,” my worth, such as it was, signifying hers. Not for a moment did Valerie believe she’d be replaced by another woman.

It took some time after my friendship with Henry began for me to be invited to her dinner parties, and then it was partly because I’d published a book but also to keep Henry company, as he felt alienated in what he referred to as “Valerie’s house.” For some years already he hadn’t really lived there, working abroad for months or staying elsewhere, with friends or other women, keeping his clothes at Valerie’s but returning to see the children, work in his room or just hang about. Valerie told herself and others that Henry required time and silence for his creativity. From this he learned how afraid she was of losing him or, alternatively, how devoted she was to him, and that he could do whatever he liked and she would accept it, refusing to reveal her dissatisfaction to him, fearing he’d use it as a reason to turn away from her for good.

These famous parties had always been held in the big kitchen downstairs, with glass doors giving onto the garden outside, which would be lit with candles. She’d had numerous staff working from the early morning at the preparation, since sometimes there’d be thirty at the table, drinking champagne and expensive wine. There were legions of people in London richer than her but few as gracefully extravagant, or able to pull such hip people to her table. For some Londoners, there were few occasions more terrifying than being invited to one of her dinners; some approached them as though they were walking into a Ph.D. examination, and for other people there was nothing more dispiriting than realising they had been dropped.

Henry and Valerie had had a good divorce. They’d behaved reasonably, as the rich are able to do, sometimes. There were no lawyers or courts. It was as though they both knew that once the marriage ended their friendship would begin. Valerie might bore, nag and castigate Henry, but she kept his name and would never risk driving him away. As long as he took her calls, she didn’t mind what he did. One day she would organise his funeral and speak first at his memorial service. She would reclaim him. Until then, she insisted on living a lot of her life side by side with him, whether he liked it or not, whether his girlfriends liked it or not, attending all previews of his work, speaking to his friends and monitoring his “love life,” confident it would remain as unfulfilled as always.

It had, after all, been she who’d helped him mould and extend his talent, even forcing him onto the social scene, telling him he was talented, he could meet whoever he wanted in London, as well as whoever she wanted. With him as her ticket, she had the mobility of the beautiful. She turned him from a long-haired, scruffy, bohemian, shy-angry kid into someone who socialised and had a country house with a swimming pool where friends visited.

During their marriage, he’d had affairs—which were mostly emotional—and eventually left. This caused her pain, but she swallowed her hatred, seeing it made little difference in the end. All she had to do was hang on. If he refused to take her calls, maybe he was on holiday, she waited for him to return. When he was hungry, he went to her to eat; when he needed advice or an opinion, he asked her; and, of course, they had the children.

Henry knew how pleased she was when Sam returned to live with her, particularly as the daughter, Lisa, had always been perverse and obstructive. She despised them for their wealth, privilege and social ease, claiming they knew only rich people, apart from their numerous employees: cleaners, builders, gardeners, nannies, au pairs. As a social worker, Lisa had seen the lower world and identified with it; she refused money from her mother, and hardly saw her. One time she even gave up social work to become a cleaner in small “dole” hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, but was fired for complaining about the conditions and wages, and for trying to organise union activity.

Lisa’s ambition had always been to go down, to be poor, the one thing it had never occurred to anyone in the family to be. Unlike the real poor, she was able to go to her mother and receive a cheque for ten thousand pounds, if necessary, and never have to pay it back. In fact, her parents would have been delighted that she had come to them, asking for help, and indeed a couple of years ago she did do this. The cheque, for at least five thousand pounds, she forwarded to a Palestinian refugee organisation, saying to her mother, “But other people aren’t given money! It separates me from others. Why are you afraid of equality?”

Henry and Lisa weren’t speaking much at the moment. He was left-wing, and getting more so as London became more vulgarly wealthy, but she only sneered at him, saying it was “superficial.” Henry had got himself into a bate about Sam leaving. He refused to admit the kid had gone for good; he wouldn’t let him collect his things. Sam wanted his computer, his clothes and his iPod, but when he came to get them, Henry had locked the stuff away, saying the kid could only have them if he lived in the house. The boy refused, not surprisingly, and threatened to come back and smash whatever it required to get his things. Henry didn’t mind the boy’s threats and the constant phone calls from his mother, since it meant he was still in contact with Sam.

I have to say I’m not sure why Henry was behaving like a spurned lover, since he was hardly at home. When I went to Miriam’s now, Henry would often be there, cooking, washing up, sitting around, talking to Miriam’s kids and their friends, who’d never seen or heard anything like him. At the moment, during the day, he had a group of film students he’d been working with, and he continued teaching whoever was around him. He was a good teacher, knowing more than enough about culture, politics and history, scattering ideas, names and movements. He did have a tendency to become irate at his students’ ignorance, as though he thought they should know everything already. But although he was an egotist, he wasn’t a narcissist.

When Henry had a new experience, he became evangelical about it, as though no one had done such a thing before. He reiterated that the club he and Miriam attended was “the most democratic place” he’d been. “Fucking is a social event, after all. You can get to meet all types.”

“Like at the National Theatre?” I enquired.

He said, “More so! Hairdressers go there, bank employees, shopkeepers, van drivers, people who live in cheap housing outside the city. From one point of view, it is absurd and banal. From another, we all know that the highest and lowest people will risk their sanity, property, marriages and reputations for the satisfaction they require. We know, too, that this world of crazy desire is one our children will enter. How odd it is to think that such madness is at the centre of human life.”

He said he and Miriam weren’t bored with one another, and they still made love normally. It wasn’t as though they’d gone as far as they could with one another. Some men, when it came to sex, thought that there should be, ideally, another man present (usually a best friend) to satisfy the woman if they were incapable of it. But I knew Miriam was one of those competent women who had learned how to ensure they were both satisfied.

One time they dressed up at my place, like a couple of teenagers preparing to go to a party: loud music by the Rolling Stones—“Hey, shouldn’t we go and see them, aren’t they coming to town?”—and lots of water. I have to say it was an endearing sight: Henry in tight PVC trousers and an armless leather vest and heavy boots, Miriam in a short skirt, high heels and suspenders, a diaphanous baby-doll thing on top.

“This won’t stay on for long,” she said.

I couldn’t help myself and said, “I hope it’s dark in there.”

“The fucking cure,” Henry had called it, as they made their way to Bushy’s cab.

“Why don’t you come with us?” asked Miriam.

“Yes,” said Henry. “I’m sure you won’t meet any of your patients there. These people are having their therapy tonight!”

“I will come,” I said. “Not tonight, but another time. Would that be okay?”

“Yes,” said Miriam, kissing me.

When they were gone, I missed their noise and hope. The flat seemed empty. There I was, rereading a book, hiding my penis between its covers!

I sat down to write. It was time for me to describe, to myself, what happened the night I could bear no more and finally decided to take action. I needed to go back there, as I knew I would always have to, over and over again.