"from G Robb's biog of V Hugo: ‘everyone is a lunatic in the privacy of his own mind'.

That was good, but was it Robb or Hugo himself? Most probably Robb. There was nothing to add; Forbes was conscious he frequently now made little sense, even to himself. Nothing to add, except perhaps "and of course a genius", though that too is a lunatic delusion.

And, on another page, this: 

"All the girls I've ever written were really one girl. She was sixteen and we lay on a bank by a river while our horses grazed. She was honey-coloured and wore a short-sleeved yellow aertex shirt and dark brown jodhpurs. I leaned over and kissed her and she responded. Then when I slipped my hand inside her shirt, she wriggled away and said no. We rode back to the riding-school stable...She was a holiday girl and the next day they left. Later we exchanged letters. Hers were always disappointing, but I refused to be disappointed. Next year at holiday-time she wasn't there and her parents told my mother she was in France on an exchange. She hadn't told me. Our correspondence withered and I never saw her again. A long time later my sister told me her marriage had broken up and she had become grotesquely fat."

What had prompted him to write that? "Honey-coloured" was vile, sloppy, since honey comes in a variety of shades. All the same, he knew what he had meant and he could still see her slightly damp skin and her wide mouth and snub nose; and, yes, he had imagined himself in love, had perhaps really been in love, first love anyway, therefore never quite dead. But the suggestion that she was all the girls he had ever written about was rhetorical nonsense. 

Or was it?

A few months previously, on what was now for him a rare visit to London, he had met an old school-friend Edward, with whom he had years ago talked books and writers for hours — tired the sun with talking, he now thought self-mockingly. They hadn't seen each other for years, more than twenty he was sure, but they had had lunch and then, for old time's sake, gone round to the Colony Room to drink brandy. Breaking off one of these sad "whatever became of old Archie?" conversations, Edward had said, "You know, I've had scores of boys over the years, more than I could count, and the trouble with every one of them was that they weren't Bobby Macrae"; and he had rolled the brandy round in the glass. Bobby Macrae, a blond boy who had played Puck to Edward's Oberon in a school production of the Dream, not right for the part, Forbes remembered, being round-faced and stocky. "Can't think," someone had said, "what Edward sees in that big bum." Only too obvious really.

"And do you know," Edward said, "he lives in Australia now and is bald and the father of five daughters. Yet that doesn't matter. I had lunch with him when I went there for the Adelaide Festival. He bored me of course, nevertheless...I think I'm a little drunk."