It was clear to me that Rowland Fitzpiers had been unable to take his mind off the story Sharon had told him about me and Harry Vilbert. I caught him on several occasions reading books about regressive hypnotism and I knew from brief conversations with him, as we crossed and re-crossed at the bedroom door, that he neither believed nor disbelieved the astounding evidence produced. Those were the sorts of distinctions he had long since ceased to make. He spent so much of his time now inhabiting that marshy border country between the science and the fiction of SF, armed with the most up-to-the-minute technological data but on the look-out for demons and hobgoblins, in possession of the expertise to fly himself to the moon and back but held fast in the mud of allegory and symbolism, that he had lost that sure sense of the difference between the actual and the unlikely that torments the mind of ordinary sceptical man. All things were equally likely and impossible to Fitzpiers. Take, for example his adventure with us. Someone else might have rubbed his eyes and said it wasn’t happening. Not Fitz. He went along with it almost absently. If it wasn’t happening what did it matter, so long as he was enjoying it? Sharon might, for all he knew, have been a metaphor for something else, but he took her on all her levels of signification and unmeaning. He was totally and irresponsibly and sentimentally hedonistic – committed with every bone in his body and every tear duct in his eye to the high ideal – he made it seem like a high ideal – of pleasure. And so he strictly speaking had no thoughts whatsoever about my relation to Thomas Hardy – if I was a reincarnation I was a reincarnation, no big deal – beyond feeling that something advantageous could be made out of it. Not advantageous only to him; Fitzpiers’s opportunism, I must say, was not without its philanthropic side: when there was a sniff of gain in the air he nosed it out, in a general way, for anybody who cared to benefit. If he’d struck oil in his own garden he wouldn’t have rung you up to tell you – not unless you were a woman with a baby – but he wouldn’t have kept it from you if you’d called round. In this case he just happened to be the first on the spot, the first to understand that what I needed above all else was someone to realise my potential, some sort of business manager or agent, someone who combined entrepreneurial flair with the proper literary tact. And Fitzpiers happened to know just the person.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Absolutely no.’

‘But you haven’t given yourself a chance to think about it.’

‘I’ve just thought about it,’ I said. ‘No.’