But it seemed as if all psychiatric medicine was aimed only at the symptoms. Mute the paranoia. Calm the rage. Raise the endorphins. Underneath, the mysteries continued, unchanged. Underneath, somewhere in the chemistry of her brain, there was something that could not be reached.

It’s like being in a dream where you can do something and every time you try to get it right, you find that the action has shifted to another place and you have to start again.

And then we discovered that love was about memory and something had disrupted her store of our collective memories.

Gertrude was a veteran of the love wars.

Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself.

Sometimes I would see myself as a book with bad binding. You know, like one more reader, one more face-down on the bed and I was going to spill everything, lose control.

But we knew that something was wrong. We smelt it in the aura she exuded. We felt it in the way her eyes met ours. There was nothing in her eyes, none of the collusive appeal to family that she normally made. Something in her brain told us we were friends so she treated us like friends, but there was nothing behind it. And then we discovered that love was about memory and something had disrupted her store of our collective memories.

It was only later that I came to understand why she never used her condition as a refuge: it would have violated her sense of fair play.

I went to bookshops to smell that lovely aroma of a new book. I would pick up a copy and run the pages across the ball of my thumb and let the fresh-baked smell flow up my nose. Then I would lick my thumb. It didn’t taste of anything, but it was like finding a chocolate wrapper inside a book and remembering the taste of the chocolate.

If anyone ever does you a favour, you cannot forget it. You must always credit them, especially in public, especially to those they love and those who love them. You must pay your debts, even those that you can never fully repay. Anything less makes you less.’ But.