This Saturday ritual is very satisfying; I found three books by Maugham I didn’t know about and one by Len Deighton I hadn’t read, and which I’ve now started, cutting my reading of poor old Rosa Chacel once again. If you ask me, Deighton’s better than le Carré when it comes to spy novels. They have some things in common (the bureaucracy of espionage, for example), but Deighton is much more entertaining. Then a delicious croissant and a delicious coffee in our usual boliche. And, most importantly, spending time with Chl, who’s passing through what looks like the best phase of her life, though she doesn’t seem to realise it; that time in a woman’s life when she’s at her most beautiful and seductive, still very young but with a hint of maturity. In the boliche we talked almost exclusively about Wittgenstein’s nephew and Thomas Bernhard, whom she admires perhaps a little too fervently. I share her admiration to an extent, but I’m not as fanatical. At one point I had to say, ‘I hope that after I die, somewhere in the world two people like us sit in a boliche and talk about me like this.’ That way of living on through art. It was as if Bernhard were there, sitting at the table with us; it was even a bit alarming, because we agreed he must have been an insufferable man (more insufferable than Rosa Chacel), and perhaps even frightening.