I wish to enter a plea for myself. I was young. I was ardent. And my only mistake really was to have chosen the wrong medium in which to work. If I had written a short story about Sharon (I could have made it as intimate as I liked) and published it in the student newspaper or the London Magazine, I would have found the very satisfaction I was searching for and earned myself some extra pocket money to boot. Who knows – I might even have made a bit of a name for myself. Look at Thomas Hardy. He was twice my age and had titled ladies making a fuss of him when he stripped Paula Power down to her pink tights and doublet and swung her from the rope in her gymnasium – in ‘absolute abandonment of herself to every muscular whim that could take possession of such a subtle form’. The fact that nobody reads A Laodicean is not a cause to congratulate Hardy on his decorum – he didn’t know that nobody was going to read it. And he certainly did whatever he could inside the novel to give as many people as possible a look at Paula ‘bending, wheeling and undulating’, even going so far as to have her spied upon through a hole in the wooden wall of her private fitness centre. That way we can all get a peek, heroes, villains (especially villains), readers, author. Especially author. You can see why he didn’t need to take photographs.

Not that we can be sure it never crossed his mind. Photography, as it happens, has a role to play in A Laodicean. The diabolic Dare – he’s the one who instigates the invasion of Paula’s privacy and actually makes the hole in the wall for Captain de Stancy to peer through – is himself a dab hand with a camera. And that can be no mere coincidence. No coincidence is ever merely mere in Hardy. As Rowland Fitzpiers was later to notice in a well-received paper on the subject, there is a profound connection between Dare’s scientific expertise – he has patented a photographic process of his own, especially effective in dim indoor lights – and the darkness (if you like, the darkroom) of his moral nature. More to the point, the vision of Paula that he procures for Captain de Stancy belongs to the convention of more than one kind of art. ‘What was the captain seeing?’ Hardy pauses to ask. Well he wasn’t going to say, ‘The same thing the butler saw,’ was he? What was the captain seeing? Why, ‘A sort of optical poem.’