And why not? I’m all for parties. (Providing Harry Vilbert doesn’t get an invite.) And her victory was bound to be a brief one. I was only resting up. There were thousands of other potential wives out there, waiting to whisk me away the minute I was ready for something other than ministration. My return home, when all is said and done, was just a little sentimental re-run of an ironical drama whose denouement was well known to both of us. And sure enough, no sooner did I begin to gain in strength under my mother’s grandiloquent care, no sooner did the perfect body she had once weighed and washed (and now could only discreetly sponge) show signs of full recovery and promise to suffer no permanent mutilation, than my mind began to look outward again, and through the throng of opportunity Gertrude Bugler’s features became once more distinct. I sat up in my old bed, propped up on a dozen pillows and surrounded by hot water-bottles, drinking lucozade and doing jig-saw puzzles (the biggest of which, the one with the most sky, was sent to me – I didn’t at the time know why – by Mr, not Mrs, Flatman). And I wondered how I was ever going to discover where Gertrude Bugler lived. There had been no address on the postcard, not even a legible postmark, and the only person that I knew who could tell me her real name was Fitzpiers. Naturally I had no intention of consulting him.

I didn’t think much about Sharon, not even when I was well and up and about again. I didn’t write to her or ring her, nor did she ring or write to me. Solicitors would eventually do our chatting for us. But images of her came back to me sometimes, whether I wanted them or not. It was the sound of her that I think I missed most – her singing and splashing in the shower, her wildly excessive laughter when I told her an amusing story. The noise of Sharon I would remember, often with great sadness, all my life. But I never once thought of making it up with her. For there was nothing further that I wanted from her. She had done her worst, and I don’t just mean with the bathroom scales. I had tested out my fears on her and I had survived. There was nothing more she could do to me. Whereas Gertrude Bugler filled me with forebodings; I believed there was no end to the trouble she could cause me. And if being in love isn’t being terrified I don’t know what is.

Gertrude Bugler scared the living daylights out of me.