Our phone calls, often made a mere five minutes after we’d parted, were half spiritual adoration – the expression of ideal Platonic yearning – and half me wanting to put my —— between her ——, and her wanting to put her —— around my ——. And our letters were much the same. Some of them were so personal that they had to be put inside several envelopes and sent registered mail. Our communications were not limited only to language either; we had begun to post off parts of ourselves to each other also, clippings and cuttings taken from the most secret recesses of our persons. I spent a whole afternoon in the British Museum Reading Room once, writing Sharon a twelve-page description of what I wished was where at that very moment, and then I put in another hour walking around Bloomsbury with the letter stuffed down my trousers. ‘PS,’ I concluded, ‘can you guess where this has been?’

Sharon’s reply came back with SWALC written on the back of the envelope. I knew she looked up to my superior learning so I corrected her when I next saw her.

‘It should be a K not a C,’ I told her.

‘I know what I sealed it with,’ she replied.

‘I only wish I could paint,’ I used to lament, when she stood in bedroom doorways for me with her arms in the air and the light behind her. So for our third anniversary – that’s to say after we’d been together for three weeks – she bought me a Brownie camera with a flash attachment.

‘I see what you mean about not being a painter,’ she said, as I arranged her on the bed the way I liked her and put the camera to my burning eye. I suspect that she had imagined, from my love of the arts, that I would go for a subtler disposition of her limbs.

‘My parents always wanted me to be a doctor,’ I told her, as another bulb popped.

‘You certainly have a flair in that direction,’ she agreed.

She drew the line at some of my suggestions, more from a dislike of pain I think, than out of modesty; but she still wondered, once I’d finished the reel, whether I’d gone too far. ‘How are you going to get them developed?’ she asked.

I can’t say that I had so far put my mind to that. I mopped my face with Sharon’s feather boa. ‘I guess I’ll take them to Boots,’ I said.

‘Boots?’

‘Or somewhere like that.’

‘Barney, Boots is run by Quakers!’

How did she know things like that? I remember her once telling me that C & A was Dutch and that Tesco was named after Tessa Cohen. And yet she thought ‘O, my America, my Newfoundland’ was a quote from Captain Cook’s journals. You can see why we were in love. We were such mysteries to each other.