IT TURNED OUT to be a much more commonplace event than I could ever have anticipated. Sharon had insisted that as it was Christmas it was to be communal or it was to be nothing, and so here we were, all three of us, sitting up in bed in broad daylight, with Sharon in the middle, eating Christmas chocolates and mince pies. All we lacked was a tree.

‘Mint?’ I enquired, leaning across Sharon and handing Fitzpiers the open box.

‘Mmmm,’ said Fitzpiers, ‘I think I’ll try an orangey one. Thank you.’

Naturally, we hadn’t gone straight into the chocolates. There had been an hour of feverish activity during which I was granted every one of my most secret wishes, some of them twice over; and there had been moments, sure enough, when I could scarcely trust the veracity of my own eyes – as, for example, when Sharon dropped to her knees and drew back Fitzpiers’s foreskin (how did she know what to do with a foreskin?) or when Fitzpiers dropped to his knees and drew back her – but no! I might have promised to come clean, but not that clean. Suffice it to say that things were done in my sight that might have turned the brain of a more fastidious man. And yet, after the first shocks and incongruities, after a brief introductory period of horror shame and mortification, I discovered – insane ingrate that I was – that what I was suffering from most was disappointment. In a remarkably short time a feeling of familiarity, even familiality, had taken possession of me – as if we had all three of us got together like this, on festivals and holy days, a dozen times before. I had fallen prey to that sensation of hollow anti-climax that waits for all men who try too hard to sin. No one had tried harder than I had, God knows. I was sin’s martyr. And therefore I felt cheated, balked of my pain.

I ascribed this dissatisfaction, partly, to the open good naturedness with which Sharon and Fitzpiers went about enjoying themselves. They gave themselves up to rapture all right, they were roused when it was right to be roused and transported when it would have been improper to be anything else, but there remained something incorrigibly convivial and companionable about them. They paused for cigarettes and jokes and conversation, and when they started up again they were painstakingly considerate of me. If I had had to put my disappointment in a nutshell I think I would have said that they were not adulterous enough.