When he wrote Bazaar he was broke and unhappy and he got home to discover just how much his trip had been resented: ‘I had been replaced. My wife had taken a lover.’ The marriage did not survive. Happily remarried, he lives in Cape Cod and the Hawaiian Islands. His wife’s presence hovers over the book: texts are exchanged. He visits botanical gardens where he once checked out bars. Low life isn’t entirely neglected: we get tarts, male and female, pimps, sex goddesses on motorbikes, tragic child-prostitutes. But he goes early to bed.

Travel is a dream state where he can experience the mirage of happiness, confronting the present and recalling the past in double exposure. From Japan, the Trans-Siberian, no longer luxurious, carries him across frozen wastes, and finally, full-circle, Eurostar brings him back to London. Travel, ‘the saddest of pleasures’, has provided glimpses of the past and the future, his own and other people’s. ‘Only the old can really see how badly the world is aging and all that we’ve lost.’ He is one of the lucky ones, the ghosts who can go wherever they want. And for him the going is still good.

Lee Langley’s latest book, A Conversation on the Quai Voltaire, is available in paperback (Vintage, £7.99).

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