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The black hat and the black coat I was familiar with, before I knew their owner It was Cambridge, the beginning of the Michaelmas Term, 1976 My second year, I was half way up Castle Street, in the dampest digs in town I recall a kind of fug over everything, from the rank stairwell, to my second-floor room Cooking, laundry and gas To employ a Hofmannesque tripartite construction And damp Our heavy landlady would toil up and down the stairs, usually with a child in tow We were a huddled group of exiles from college, all of us reading English, though not in any way strenuously   It was Victorian Novel term, and my second-hand copies of Little Dorrit and Middlemarch lay unopened on the table, where they began to grow verdigris It was more important at that time to be considered a thespian, which was apparently what ‘the beautiful people’ did, and most of them were ‘reading English’ A part in a play at the ADC, and above all, to be seen in the mirrors of the ADC bar, that was the glamorous thing And to meet budding actresses I was no good at it, though So the other thing was to gather in a friend’s room, slump to Dylan – these were the years of his great revival (or one of them), Blood on the Tracks, Desire, Street Legal –  and smoke One of our group rolled joints studiously, sitting up at a desk, and it looked uncannily as though he were writing an essay So ‘writing an essay’ became code for rolling a joint It was not done, in those far-off days, to be seen working (though it turned out some of us had been, traitorously and furtively) And it must have been in the rare studious moments at my table, in those damp digs in Castle Street, that I first glimpsed the figure in black, apparently surveying the town from the top of Castle Hill   If I had known my Balzac, I might have thought – there is Rastignac, when he climbs to the top of Montmartre and