And yet he had never succumbed to physical attraction. He had gloried in his solitariness. It was only when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that he had begun to brood on what he had missed. Because what was he nowadays? No longer a shining knight: just another impotent old fellow, no more heroic than the average patient in a nursing home. Sometimes he wondered what had been the point of it all. The night-time pang was no longer of lust; it was of regret.
