I also tried to mingle with a girl who was taller, stronger, more confident, and if anything better featured and proportioned – though less amenably beautiful and on display – than Sharon. Sharon was dark and lustrous and seemed to yield the promise of infinite understanding. Nobody could see Sharon and not want her to kiss some part of himself better. The stranger, on the other hand, possessed Valkyrie looks and appeared to be as sympathetic as a razor blade. I was especially taken with her teeth which were big and white and pointed, apparently sharpened daily on raw flesh.

‘What’s your bag?’ I asked her, looking up.

The girl regarded me with distant curiosity, as if surprised (but only for want of other occupation) that something such as I should have a voice. ‘Gertrude Bugler,’ she told me.

I remember that I shook my head and pondered the strange and cruel distribution of God’s gifts – a fine creature such as this, apparently finished and perfect, to be hard of hearing! Tragic.

‘I asked you what your bag was,’ I tried again, taking great care to mouth my words carefully this time, so that she could read my lips, ‘not your name. I just wondered which bit of Hardy you were into.’

‘Gertrude Bugler,’ she repeated.

It was heart-rending. The contrast between her beauty and her affliction brought a lump to my throat. ‘I love you,’ I told her, without any hope of being understood. ‘I love you and I’d like to take you somewhere far away from here where we could be alone together and not mind the silence and the misunderstandings forever.’ And I kept smiling so that she would know it was all all right.

She looked at me placidly. Then she looked into her empty glass for a moment before she said, ‘I can’t see that wife of yours approving such a plan. She is yours, isn’t she, the one with the stupendous tits? You look like a tit man. I think you ought to get back to her. She looks too pretty to be left on her own. I need to get myself another slug of gin.’

‘Met anybody interesting?’ asked Sharon, shortly afterwards.

‘Gertrude Bugler,’ I immediately confessed. ‘I don’t know whether she’s interesting but she’s certainly unusual. She pretends she can’t hear what you’re saying. But at least she’s not an authority on Hardy.’

‘Gertrude Bugler? Isn’t that the name of the actress that Hardy fell in love with when he was eighty? The one that played Tess on the stage?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

But of course I didn’t doubt that Sharon was right. I felt foolish and I felt threatened. The girl was an authority on Hardy like the rest of them.