I’ll never forget the time Camilla first came across that phrase. We were sitting on the cliffs in the warm early morning, reading. Around us the waked birds preened. Below us the seals … you know all that. Suddenly there was an explosion of violent mirth from Camilla – it shook the cliffs, I’ll tell you; it was a good job that no one from the National Trust was there to spot fine us. And then there was the sound of the New Wessex Edition of A Laodicean spinning through the thin air and falling into the Atlantic spume. ‘Christ!’ Camilla exclaimed. ‘I hate the little rat. Optical poem indeed. He’d use any word but the true one. I suppose he called his prick a telespectroscope.’

To this day a round blue Greater London Council plaque commemorates the London house where peeping Tom Hardy resided for three years and shaped the notion of inviting everyone round to Paula’s gym for a secret session (secret to Paula) of prose photos. Take a number 19 bus from Piccadilly and get off the stop after Wandsworth Common, or better still take the tube to Tooting Bec and walk up Trinity Road, and you will find it – Hardy’s house that is, not Paula’s gym. I did, years later. I stood on the pavement opposite for half an hour and looked for shadows on the blinds and wondered if the place stirred any memories. This was after I’d received another shock to my confidence about who I was. But at nineteen I had other things to occupy my mind. At nineteen I was literal and urgent; I wanted immediate returns; it would never have occurred to me to sit down quietly at my desk and compose opthalmic poetry. That is why no round blue plaque commemorates the spot in which I foisted photographs of the girl I loved on that ungrateful frumkeh, Monty Frankel.

Nor that wherein, some ten years later and apparently not much changed, I tried to make a present of the girl herself to the equally ungrateful critic and reviewer, Rowland Fitzpiers.

[6]

Weeks passed and we heard nothing from Fitzpiers. Not a phone call, not a postcard, not a whisper – nothing. Naturally I put myself through every refinement of suffering. Sometimes I blamed him, sometimes I wished to make it up to him. Sometimes I thought I’d maybe heard him wrong, sometimes I was relieved I’d heard him right. One day I would miss my jealousy terribly, and would really long to be tormented again by his desire for Sharon; on another day I would find the idea that he didn’t desire her even more stimulating than the idea that he did. For some reason the thought of sexual discourtesy to Sharon was especially rousing. But those were deep waters. And I had already foundered in shallower. I reminded myself that there was Sharon, too, for me to feel bad about.