I marvelled at his ingenuity. I confess that there was a boyish, sanguine quality about Fitzpiers that I always liked. But I was not disposed to give him any encouragement in this enterprise. It might have been Christmas but I had already given him enough today. ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Faking Hardy doesn’t just carry a heavy term of imprisonment. You’d be lynch-mobbed. The English are very sensitive about their primitives. A boy at my old school was sent to borstal for drawing a moustache on a photograph of Emily Brontë in the public library. His parents had to leave the district.’

I could tell that Fitzpiers thought I was hopelessly negative. And Sharon was even more contemptuous of me still. It clearly helped her to have some moral support. ‘Who’s talking about faking Hardy anyway?’ she wanted to know. She almost spat the question at me.

‘Then just what are you talking about, Sharon?’ I asked. She wasn’t the only one who could spit.

‘I’m talking about you going back to Harry Vilbert with a pencil and a piece of paper in your hand, if you want to know,’ she said. ‘And don’t tell me that it doesn’t work – I’ve just been reading about a woman who composes Beethoven sonatas that way.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The name Harry Vilbert – brought up in Fitz’s presence. It was against everything that we’d agreed. It was an abrogation of all her promises. ‘That’ll do, Sharon,’ I ordered.

‘Who’s Harry Vilbert?’ asked Fitzpiers.

‘Nobody,’ I told him.

‘A hypnotist,’ said Sharon.

‘I love hypnotists,’ said Fitzpiers. ‘I went to one once, to stop me smoking. He smoked like a train himself. He wore a buttoned cardigan and carpet slippers and he smelt of sprouts. What do you go to yours for? To help you write? Or to remove some other kind of blockage?’

‘I don’t go to him,’ I said.

‘He went to him,’ said Sharon.

‘That’s not true either. I fell into his clutches.’

‘How wonderful!’ said Fitzpiers. ‘What did he do – turn you into an opera singer? Or did he get you to procure small boys for him?’

‘He did neither,’ said Sharon. ‘He regressed him.’

‘Sharon!’

Fitzpiers just wanted to make sure he had heard that right. ‘He regressed him?’

And I wanted to make sure that he had not. ‘Sharon,’ I boomed, ‘that’s enough!’

‘Yes. He regressed him. Twice.’

‘Sharon!’

Fitzpiers sat up in bed. You couldn’t hope to see a man having a better time. I think we all knew that he would never again experience a happier Christmas. But he was also taking a scientific interest in what he was being told. He wanted to be clear about the details. ‘Do you mean he regressed him back to his own childhood?’ he asked. ‘Or did he take him back even further?’ It didn’t at all help my temper that in Fitzpiers’s fidgety excitement his penis had become visible from under the bedclothes.