A couple of weeks later he invited us to an informal little get-together at his place – nothing much, just a few friends, for wine and cheese and amiable chat. Sharon attended to her toilet, on the night, with great particularity considering the casualness of the occasion, and she even fussed and quibbled over mine, sending me back to my wardrobe twice to make a better job of matching my tie to my sweater and my sweater to my socks. Herself, she wore her breasts and shoulders largely out but expensively accoutred, in that style designed to draw attention as much to the man who can afford to own them as to themselves. ‘Jesus, Sharon,’ I remarked when she was ready, ‘you look as though I run a string of racehorses. Who are we expecting to meet tonight – Lord Longford’s daughters?’

‘I don’t know who we’re going to meet,’ she said, and I would have noticed guilt in her expression had I not been transfixed by what happened to her shoulders when she shrugged them.

As it turned out there were no titled ladies that I could identify at Fitzpiers’s party, but there did appear to be rather more guests who were knowledgeable and keen to talk about Thomas Hardy than one might have expected to find in any random group. There was a Hardy Professor of Modern Literature whom I knew by sight and a hack Hardy biographer whom I recognized through his sentences. There was a president of a Hardy moorland preservation society and a treasurer of a Hardy anti-vivisectionist association and three members of a Hardy hiking club. Add to these a pair of Hardy topographers arguing over boundaries in a corner, the curator of a Hardy museum, four Hardy editors with their research assistants, and a hatful of assorted Hardy fellows, memorabiliasts and amateur enthusiasts, and it is possible to understand why I became progressively alarmed.

‘I don’t like it,’ I challenged Sharon. ‘I don’t like it one little bit.’

‘It’s just a coincidence,’ she assured me. She was standing against a wall, not talking to anybody but looking obscurely proud. ‘Fitz knows all kinds of people. Go and mingle.’

I mingled with a nervous woman who’d been either smiling or grimacing at me for some time.

‘What are you researching into?’ I asked.

‘Thomas …’

‘Yes, I realise that. I meant what aspect.’

‘The juvenilia.’

‘The juvenilia? Really? That wouldn’t be leaving much for anybody else to research into, would it?’