But we build wea- pons systems to US requirements, we get permission to sell to many different countries … we don’t sell missiles that are intended for non-military targets…”I pulled from my bag the photographs which Najla Abujahjah had taken of the victims. The executive to my left looked through them with an expression of horror. Then he said: “I don’t want these.” And he slid the pictures of the dead and wounded members of the Jiha family across the heavily polished table-top The Colonel looked at them and gently returned them to me. But they didn’t want Boeing involved and – equally obviously – they were frightened of criticising Israel. During the afternoon, one man at Boeing would be heard to say twice – in identical words, I observed in my notebook – “Whatever you do, I don’t want you to quote me as saying anything critical of Israel’s policies.”Then one of the executives made up his mind.

“Let me speak as a soldier, not as an employee of Boeing,” he said. “No professional soldier is going to condone the killing of innocent people as targets We’re trained to preserve the peace… Part of the point of Theroux is that he deliberately puts himself on the outside: by being a classic Henry James-style American in London during his 20-year marriage to his first wife Anne, a World Service producer, and travelling so relentlessly abroad. Now he is in Hawaii, of course, which I suppose is as good a place to be an alien as any.Fans of Theroux will have followed the story of his marriage to, and messy divorce from, Anne. He mentioned this as soon as we met, in the context of the previous night’s general election. He’d watched the television coverage with his eldest son Marcel, 29 (who is soon publishing a novel himself), and said that, of course, he was just a spectator because he couldn’t vote.

Would he go back in real life? This prompted an unusual silence “My town?.. Maybe… But, as I said in the story, returning to your home town and living there, it’s failure.” And he didn’t want to fail? This was ignored “It’s not such an awful place. But if you stayed there you’d never write anything…”A recurrent theme of Theroux’s books is this sense of being an alien, on the outside looking in. So,” – and at this point he segued seamlessly into his washed-up alter ego in My Other Life – “at my lowest point I come back miserable and found an invitation to meet the Queen, head of the church, Defender of the Faith! And I thought, `Let’s think about this for a moment!’ It was funny…”He once wrote a story about returning to his home town and hanging out with a group of drop-outs at a tattoo party.

Theroux told me he went to a big school with “a lot of dangerous people” in it and that he had been “a nerdy little guy”. This was one of many intriguing titbits I tried to pursue, but he had whizzed off. “There was this tough guy who would see me and say: `What you lookin’ at?’ I’d say, `Nothing’, and he’d say: `What you lookin’ at?’ When I was growing up in that school I was dying to leave, to go anywhere – Africa, Singapore, Catford”Really? Why? “I wanted to get away from my town, my school, my family. I wanted to live my own life, I didn’t want people breathing down my neck, saying, `What are you going to do with your life?’ all those questions from the Fifties. His father was a leather-goods manufacturer, then a shoe salesman. In the past he has also admitted to being a loner who liked to shoot small animals – an interesting tendency often shared by serial killers.

In My Other Life Theroux observes that the problem with being a writer in therapy is that “of course you failed, because you needed your secrets”.In this spirit Theroux waved away questions about his childhood in Boston, although he did let slip that he was one of seven children and never had any privacy. His new novel, which was published by Hamish Hamilton this month, is called Kowloon Tong and the middle-aged main character’s only bit of independence from his mother is the fact that he secretly sleeps with prostitutes. Yes.” Theroux added that he didn’t suppose she had read it, and I said it was quite likely she had. He seemed to like this idea but continued to deny the possibility in the way people do when they would like to believe they are wrong.EVEN MORE than he loves his make-believe privacy, Theroux adores his secrets, as is obvious from a glance at his books. That’s pretty good.” He watched me as I scribbled this down, and repeated helpfully: “Lunch with Margaret Dinner with Anne.