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David did not take part in all the macho behaviour and tried to keep us together. He saw before we did how jealousy would drive us apart—and he did his best to stop it. ‘You lot are horny apes,’ he said. ‘Eager beavers.’ David already knew that everything we call romantic is, in fact, the destroyer of romanticism, or in any case of unselfish boyhood romanticism.

‘So you wouldn’t like to fuck her?’ said Joost. David shrugged his shoulders in irritation. ‘You don’t say you’d like to screw André, do you?’ he said. ‘You don’t talk like that about your friends.’

‘But I don’t want to,’ said Joost. ‘That’s the difference between women and friends.’

Laura knew what her effect on us was, but at the beginning she showed no sign of favouritism, as if she knew that that would mean the immediate end of her place in our group. She balanced like a ballerina on pointe and divided her attention between the five of us as if she were keeping an account in which she maintained an accurate record of the distribution of her sympathy.