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interview had been arranged for me with one of the national daily newspapers. The event would take place here in the hotel. In the evening there was a party at a venue in the city centre where food would be provided. The festival was operating a coupon system for food: I could use these coupons both here at the hotel and later at the party. She produced a wad of printed slips, several of which she carefully tore away along a perforated line and handed to me, after making a note of their serial numbers on the list in front of her. She also handed me an information leaflet and a message from my publisher, saying he would meet me before the afternoon event in the hotel bar.
    Part of the hotel bar had been cordoned off for a wedding reception. People stood in the dark, low-ceilinged space holding glasses of champagne. The windows along the rounded wall let in a strong, cold light from one side and the contrast of light and darkgave the guests’ clothes and faces a slightly garish appearance. A photographer was leading people in pairs or small groups out on to the terrace where they stood in the cool, breezy day, holding their expressions for the camera. The bride and groom were talking and laughing in a circle of guests, side by side but turned away from one another. Their faces wore an expression of self-consciousness, almost of culpability. I noticed that everyone there was around the same age as the married couple, and the absence of anyone older or younger made it seem as though these events were bound neither to the future nor the past, and that no one was entirely certain whether it was freedom or irresponsibility that had untethered them.
    The rest of the bar was empty except for a small fair-haired man who sat in a leather booth with a book on the table in front of him. When he saw me he held it up so that I could see its cover. He looked at the back jacket and then looked at me and then looked at it again.
    â€˜You are nothing like your photograph!’ he exclaimed reproachfully, when I was close enough to hear.
    I pointed out that the photograph he had chosen for the cover was more than fifteen years old.
    â€˜But I love it!’ he said. ‘You look so – guileless.’
    He began to tell me about another of his authors, whose book photograph showed a slim and lovelywoman with a long, fair waterfall of shining hair. In the flesh she was grey-haired and somewhat overweight and unfortunately suffered from an eye condition that obliged her to wear glasses with thick bottle-like lenses. When she appeared at readings and festivals the contrast was most obvious, and he had occasionally raised the delicate question of using a more recent photograph, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Why should her photograph be accurate? So that she could be identified by the police? The whole point of her profession, she said, was that it represented an escape from reality. Besides, she preferred being that sylph with the waterfall of hair. In some part of herself, she believed that that was who she still was. A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.
    â€˜She is one of our most popular authors,’ he said, ‘as you can imagine.’
    He asked me how I liked the hotel and I said that I had found its circularity surprisingly confusing. Several times already I had tried to go somewhere and found myself back where I started. I hadn’t realised, I said, how much of navigation is the belief in progress, and the assumption of fixity in what you have left behind. I had walked around the entire circumference of the building in search of things I had been right next to in the first place, an error that was virtually guaranteed by the fact that all the building’s sources of naturallight had been concealed by angled partitions, so that the routes around it were almost completely dark. You found the light, in other words, not by following it but by stumbling on it randomly