So what was Fitz up to? This was supposed to be an informal gathering of friends not a conference. Could it be that he was whetting my social appetite with this little foretaste of the kind of company I could be keeping if I only yielded to his suggestions and let him manage me? If that was so then he was wasting good wine and cheese. I looked around the room; with the exception of the murderous Valkyrie who had gone in search of gin (I’d supposed she’d meant the drink but she might have meant the instrument of torture), and Fitzpiers who was at the front door welcoming a latecomer, and Sharon who was at my side, and of course myself, this was an abysmal gathering. I considered myself to be something of an expert on experts. I’d met a lot of them. I’d been taught by them. I submitted articles to them. I came upon them browsing in Sharon’s shop, looking for information that no one else possessed. And I knew that they were all, a posteriori, anal retentives. There was no other explanation for why they wanted to know more about something than anybody else, and for why they hoarded knowledge, like loose change, in case the good times never came again. I wasn’t being metaphorical when I called them anal retentives; they walked about the room with their buttocks clenched and their faces stiff with the strain of literally hanging on to their stools. Years later their like would surface – not as experts on Hardy but on other comparable kinds of tightness – in the great potty-conscious Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher; and that air of triumphant niggardliness wedded to that waddle of extreme physical discomfort would become a sine qua non for the retention of government office. A sound principle was in operation: it was presumed that if you could hang on to one thing you could hang on to another.