‘Sharon, are you proposing that I write you a Christmas story that you can pass off as being by Thomas Hardy?’

She sat up and drew the bed clothes up to her neck. I got the impression that she was drawing a line below which she would never again do me any favours. ‘Forget it,’ she said.

I was staggered. ‘Sharon,’ I said, ‘what makes you think that I am capable of writing a Christmas story that I or you or both of us together could foist upon an astonished world as Thomas Hardy’s?’

‘You’re always saying he writes trash.’

‘That doesn’t mean that I can duplicate it.’

‘Just hang on a minute,’ said Fitzpiers. He hadn’t been able to follow very much of this, but if Sharon knew some way of making money by counterfeiting Thomas Hardy he would be in on it if I wouldn’t. He considered himself to be a gifted copyist, and, as he later told Sharon, he had always secretly preferred parodies to their originals anyway. One of his major points about science fiction was that it was essentially a pastiche of all other narrative forms. ‘Just hang on here. Surely the three of us could in fact put our heads together and come up with a pretty passable imitation, particularly as we’re talking about a genre that we’ve all agreed he never could have mastered. We don’t need to do too good a job – in fact the clumsier we make it the more authentic it will feel.’

I marvelled at his ingenuity. I confess that there was a boyish, sanguine quality about Fitzpiers that I always liked. But I was not disposed to give him any encouragement in this enterprise. It might have been Christmas but I had already given him enough today. ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Faking Hardy doesn’t just carry a heavy term of imprisonment. You’d be lynch-mobbed. The English are very sensitive about their primitives. A boy at my old school was sent to borstal for drawing a moustache on a photograph of Emily Brontë in the public library. His parents had to leave the district.’

I could tell that Fitzpiers thought I was hopelessly negative. And Sharon was even more contemptuous of me still. It clearly helped her to have some moral support. ‘Who’s talking about faking Hardy anyway?’ she wanted to know. She almost spat the question at me.

‘Then just what are you talking about, Sharon?’ I asked. She wasn’t the only one who could spit.

‘I’m talking about you going back to Harry Vilbert with a pencil and a piece of paper in your hand, if you want to know,’ she said. ‘And don’t tell me that it doesn’t work – I’ve just been reading about a woman who composes Beethoven sonatas that way.’