‘He’s little in the soul, Sharon. He’s a worm. He’s the worm that flies in the night. That’s the only way he knows how to travel. And if that’s the direction you like to be approached from – so be it. That, as you say, is your affair. But there is one right that remains to me – I won’t have him taking you to wife swapping parties while you’re still married to me. Do you hear me, Sharon? You’re not his to swap.’

I knew, the minute I heard myself say this, what was coming. ‘I’m not yours to swap either, Barney,’ Sharon said, and there was still a year to go before the publication of Sexual Politics and The Female Eunuch.

Of course I accepted that she was right semantically, if we were going to quibble over words, but I was damned if I was going to argue with her about the nature of possession at a time like this, when the great tragic themes were hereabouts. I hurled myself across the bed in the direction of the telephone and dialled Fitzpiers’s number. It was part of the science of his life that he should possess a telephone answering machine, just as it was part of the fiction that he should suppose he needed one. But it served him well today. ‘This is a recorded announcement,’ his voice said. ‘After the bleep would you please leave your name and a brief message.’ ‘This is Thomas Hardy,’ I answered, after the bleep. ‘Here is my brief message: Swap your own fucking wife.’

It’s possible that I was still nothing like as angry as I would have liked to be. At any rate I hadn’t frightened Sharon. ‘What are you whipping yourself up for?’ she asked me. ‘You don’t care that much. You’re just suffering from mild pique. You always said you wouldn’t care. You were right.’

‘Sharon, I’ll show you how much I care. Before this day is over I’ll be out of the house.’

‘Why, because you feel humiliated? I thought you liked to be humiliated.’

Me? ‘There are humiliations and there are humiliations,’ I explained to her, so that she wouldn’t confuse them ever again.