I was not, however, downhearted. The search was exhilarating. The longer it went on the more desirable and mythological the object became. She certainly put on a couple of inches in height and grew longer teeth. And all the time my health returned. I took a small flat in Notting Hill Gate and commuted four days a week to Oxford where I taught in a language school and tried to persuade Danish girls that naturalness was an enemy to fun. I was no longer morbid. I no longer wondered who I was. If I might so put it, I felt like my old self again. But my old self with a new future. Everything pointed forwards. I didn’t have a care for the past. And then I came upon some alarming information that undid all this good. I had put myself on a mailing list to receive news of every fresh addition to the Hardy canon – it didn’t matter how trivial or seemingly unimportant – for that way I would be on to Gertrude Bugler the moment that she surfaced. I wasn’t in any hurry, but I didn’t want to miss out on her. And it was through this channel that I came to hear about the sensational findings that were rocking the world of Hardy scholarship to its core. Someone had unearthed a photograph of a mysterious boy and was arguing that he had been born in the early summer of 1868 to Tryphena Sparks and her cousin/uncle/brother, Thomas. The argument was plumped out with the usual biographical and meteorological authentication – why wasn’t Tryphena showing up for work that week? what else could a couple do in such a long late hot autumn but make babies? – and it was even accompanied by confirmatory interviews with ancient members of the family. I didn’t look too closely into any of that. The photograph was enough for me. It showed a familiar woe-begone countenance and an unmistakably full wet lip. There was no evading it. It was all in the saga. The miserable basket had not died childless after all. He had kept the lines of communication back to him open. It was therefore possible he had a great-great-grandson still living, somewhere, in pain.

Predictably, a letter from Sharon’s solicitors reached me first post the following morning. It told me what I had learnt already and added another fact that I might find instructive.