‘Well I can’t argue with you there,’ said Fitzpiers. ‘A happy Hardy Christmas party is certainly difficult to imagine. Think of the fuss there’d be, for a start, over the killing of the dinner. You wouldn’t want to leave it to Jude and whatsename.’

‘Arabella,’ Sharon helped out.

‘That’s right, Arabella. Arabella Donn – she of the rank passions and the latent hungry sensuousness and the ample…’ But here Fitzpiers was guilty of the unpardonable sin of explicitness, for he lowered his eyes in mid-sentence and allowed them to range referentially over Sharon’s uncovered breasts. The action irritated me not because it was libidinous and even possessive but because it was overt – it alluded, it brought into the realms of the spoken what belonged properly to the understood; it confused the darkness with the daylight. What’s more I didn’t want Sharon associated, even by implication, with Arabella. I had nothing against Arabella – apart from her passing interest in Jude – but I remembered how much Hardy hated her because she was passionate and buxom, and the bad faith of the novelist’s impaired sexuality was suddenly with me, like an ill omen, in the bed.

I felt queasy, as if I’d perceived in myself the old symptoms of an old sickness.

Sharon was still at the impossible Hardy Christmas party. ‘Of course all the presents would go astray,’ she said.

‘Or go to the wrong people,’ Fitzpiers came back.

‘Yes, yes, they would,’ she agreed. ‘And later on in the evening, when the mummers had gone home, all the men could get drunk and auction their wives.’

At this I looked hard into Sharon’s eyes, but they were limpid. If there was a woman anywhere freer of intention I would like to have seen her. ‘And then all the wives could get up a skimmity ride,’ I suggested, just to keep it equal.

Fitz had an even brighter idea. ‘What about the mottoes inside the Christmas crackers? Imagine the kiddies’ smiling faces when they unfold the riddle in the party-hat and find, Question: Which do we live on – a splendid or a blighted planet? Answer: A blighted one. Ha! Ha! Ha!’

I had one too. ‘How about, All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.’

‘Yours wins,’ laughed Fitzpiers.

‘It’s beginning to look,’ said Sharon, after another ten minutes of this kind of jollification, ‘as though we don’t take the idea of a Hardy Christmas story very seriously.’

We didn’t.

‘And it’s also beginning to look,’ she went on, ‘as though there’s no point in my asking you to knock me a couple out for next Christmas.’ She fixed me with a long stare which I recognised to mean that she considered that I owed her.

‘A couple?’ I wasn’t arguing with the obligation, I just wasn’t certain what she wanted me to pay with.

‘One then.’