Long after the ecstatic intruders had left us – Camilla had sent them next in search of the stony stile – we remained quiet, brooding separately. It really must have been a marvellous day, because I can distinctly remember taking off my tie and rolling up my shirt sleeves and commenting on how nice it was out here. Such avid naturism was not called out of me without good reason. But my words served only to remind Camilla of her theme. Her anger against mankind in general had been aggravated, it seemed, by her being forced to recall the one man in particular, that presiding genius who had grieved upon this little bridge. ‘And when the woman has been bullied and harried unto death,’ she said, assuming that I had been following all her silent thoughts or that I was smart enough to fill in the gaps myself, ‘when she has attained to the only peace and independence she is likely ever to have known, then along he comes again with his bent back and his remorse and his generous gift of guilt, making her death yet one more triumph for him, muscling in once more on whatever dignity or sympathy or attention happens to be going. Another Hamlet taking on all-comers in Ophelia’s grave. Fucking men with their obtrusive fucking guilt!’

I didn’t take it personally at the time – I seemed a long way from country graveyards then – but there is no possibility of my not noticing now that some of the flak from Camilla’s firing was meant to come my way. Guilt was one of my words. It helped me to understand myself. I believed I carried it in every pocket and that the weight of it was the reason I bent slightly at the knees. It’s certainly the reason I’m not entirely upright now.

Don’t mistake me, though. The guilt I’ve always been interested in is not the usual variety of cosmic unworthiness. I’m not a self-hater. I don’t wonder what such a creature as I is doing crawling across the face of the earth. I don’t feel that I’m largely to blame for starving Africans or camps of futureless refugees. What I’m referring to is a very particular sense of having let women down, not just the odd woman and not merely at random, but as it were the whole sex, systematically.

Perhaps a fragment of family history will help me to explain more exactly what I mean.

On the night he was married my father turned in his sleep, slipped both his hands inside the pure white nightdress of his softly slumbering wife – this is my mother I’m talking about: I have the right to heightened language – and murmured, ‘Lucetta, ah Lucetta, comme tu est douce! Que je t’aime!’

This was a surprise to both of them, for not only could my father speak no French, my mother’s name was Rachel.