I can still see Camilla swinging her legs as she spoke, absently kicking the surface of the stream, her toes painted a deep Clytemnestra purple, frightening away the summer flies that had paused to feed and cool off.

‘Admit I’m right,’ she said, after I’d failed to respond. ‘Admit that there isn’t a single person in the village that isn’t sorry for Ken for being stuck with a neurotic wife. Decent old Ken who just wanted to paint birds and collect worms in peace. Admit that the assertion of the male will begins, like everything else, in the country.’

What could I say? I wouldn’t have argued with her if I’d wanted to. She looked brown and strong and immovable. And I was sitting on the very edge of the bridge. True, the stream was shallow, but I couldn’t swim an inch and was quite capable of drowning in a hip bath. And anyway, I didn’t wish to quarrel with her. I didn’t think anything good came out of Nature either. Even food had nothing to recommend it to my taste until all trace of the earth had been grilled or sautéed out of it. I was the last person to argue that it wasn’t the same with human beings.

I nodded and smiled, but before I could get around to shaping a fuller answer we were disturbed by a couple of wonder-struck students from Camilla’s summer school. Camilla had founded the school three or four years earlier – before my time, that is – on the shrewd hunch that there would be some amongst the annual literary pilgrims who would welcome serious organization, the provision of expert lectures, properly researched and conducted rambles, and above all the opportunity to meet like-minded enthusiasts in an atmosphere conducive to devotional exchanges of findings and opinions. On perfect days like this Camilla sent everybody off in different directions, with copies of the poems, in order to find the field where and the bridle path from whence and the high cliff whither. Well, wasn’t this the little bridge on which? Yes, yes, it was. How clever of them to have recognised it! And had they also noticed on the way the selfsame small weir and the very stepping-stone? Camilla was marvellously encouraging and informative. To an untrained eye she even appeared to have a passion for her subject. But then he was her living.