On some nights he would go on for hours. There is no possibility that he could have made these names up. There were too many of them. And we never caught him out repeating any. He simply remembered them. He saw them once and he never again forgot them. From which it must follow that there was nothing organically wrong with his memory. Some other explanation must therefore be found for why he so often suffered amnesia when he came to address or give something to his wife, and why he so frequently confused her with other women, real or imaginary, who might or might not have enjoyed some separate and individual existence in his life.

Guilt, of course, is where I’m heading, guilt husbandly and filial, guilt personal and atavistic, but I’ve no objection to pausing briefly, on the way, at guilt’s greatest ally, love. ‘Twice or thrice had I loved thee,’ I tried to convince Camilla on countless cliff walks or valley rambles, ‘Before I knew thy face or name.’ But I was never successful. ‘You’d say that to anyone,’ she told me, ‘you’ve said it to I’ll never know how many others.’ Which showed how far she was from grasping what I was telling her. It wasn’t her fault. No member of her sex can ever understand how, for a man, love is a continuum. They cannot bear the idea that all previous women are but a dream of them, because that must mean that they themselves are but a dream of someone else. It’s no coincidence that Plato was a man.

‘I don’t want to be a part of your continuum, thanks very much,’ Camilla told me, as though this was an area where either of us could exercise any choice. Lucetta might just as well have protested against popping up in my father’s wedding-night dreams. My poor father – he is only a man like the rest of us; no wonder he could never be absolutely certain who his wife was: sometimes I have woken up next to Camilla and not known whether she was herself or my mother or my cousins or Sharon or the little girl whose head I split open on bonfire night, 1947, because her fireworks rose higher in the sky than mine.

And so, although Camilla happened to be the last and best, and although these are exclusively her haunts I try each day to track her down through, strictly speaking I walk this wild western shore, attired as if I’m on the way to a wine bar, for all of them.