Our Evenings is the seventh novel by Alan Hollinghurst and a wonderful example of what he is so good at: staging richly bookish, hifalutin comedies of sexual errors featuring people coming to terms with their own and others’ selfhood. This time, a new note is audible: Hollinghurst engages movingly with time’s depredations, and the inevitability of ageing and mortality.

A laconic prelude delivers the story of the death of an old philanthropist, Mark Hadlow, who is the father of a millionaire  pro-Brexit Tory minister called Giles. The narrator, Dave, an actor, is lying in bed with somebody called Richard late one morning, there being no rehearsal that day for the play in which he is appearing, Racine’s Bajazet. Later, at lunch with Mark’s widow, Cara, Dave reflects on how long he has known the couple and on the violent treatment Giles meted out to him when they were both at school. How all that came about is not disclosed. They share a lemon tart, which Cara remembers was Dave’s favourite in childhood. ‘Amazing memory you have,’ he says, referring to more than just the pudding, which he seems to have forgotten was ever a favourite. Such forgetfulness fits with Dave’s comment, in relation to Bajazet, that his ‘famous memory’s not quite what it was’. He can ‘remember yesterday in detail, and fifty years ago with new and unexpected clarity, but a small mental floater blurs and half obscures last week’. 

Hollinghurst is a very teasing teaser-out. It takes a while for us to learn that Dave is David Win, a half-Burmese man in his sixties, and to hear of his affair with Hector, whom we have come across in passing. It takes longer still for Richard to be unveiled