I would have been getting more the thing I was after if words of love or desperation had been wrung out of Sharon in her ecstasies. Phrases such as, ‘Never leave me, Fitz!’ or ‘I want it only from you, Fitzpiers!’ would have done the trick, but if they crossed Sharon’s mind they never escaped her lips. Once in a while I tried to coach her, coming at her from the other side to Fitzpiers, and whispering in her ear instructions for her to follow. ‘Implore him to kiss your breasts,’ I suggested.

‘What?’

If I whispered any louder Fitz would hear. ‘Beg him to kiss your breasts,’ I repeated, stressing the beg.

But it was no use. ‘Barney wants me to ask you to kiss my tits,’ she announced.

Mind you, once we had all become a little weary I was grateful for the prevailing mood of simple companionableness. I didn’t really want my wife to be in love with my friend, and in fact I must confess to feeling quite peeved on a couple of occasions during the aftermath of passion when Sharon took liberties with Fitzpiers, even though the liberties she took were as child’s play to what she’d taken a half an hour before. It concerned me that Sharon seemed unaware of the unspoken rules that govern the before and after. I believe that I am not and never have been an oaf or a brute in this regard. I knew that one had no right to disown when one was spent what one had longed for when one was eager. Sadness after the event, for example, had never seemed to me to confer any privileges. And I never turned on women as Thomas Hardy the novelist did. But I was a confirmed and compulsive fantasist, and I understood in all its refinements the etiquette of make-believe.

Sharon, it appeared, from the way she ran her fingers through the hairs on Fitzpiers’s chest, didn’t.