I had another reason too, if any other reason were needed, to be taken by Camilla’s pamphlet: I was provoked by what it had to say about railway travel. As I remember – I don’t have the pamphlet itself in front of me, only Camilla’s original notes – it bore a Freudian tag relating the erotic significance of trains to the sexual excitation caused by the mechanical agitation of the body; but if Camilla was a dedicated Freudian (as how could she not be, as I was later to understand, with a father like hers?) she was at once more metaphysical and more unforgiving than Freud also. And she had a more developed intuition for the principle of unpleasure. Anyway I believed she was right not to ascribe merely to the sensation of rocking and the incidence of tunnels that emotional turbulence, that yearning for violent change in transient circumstances, which is forever associated with locomotives. It wasn’t just Hardy and Mrs Henniker that she put me in mind of, it was also Lawrence’s heroes pressed up against erect soldiers with dumb coarsely-beautiful hands on the journey from Charing Cross to Westerham, and Anna and Vronsky caught in a raging tempest within and without, actual and metaphorical, but ostensibly on a platform somewhere between Moscow and St Petersburg, and Tolstoy himself stopped in flight in ardent and destructive old age at Astapovo station. And above all she put me in mind of me, commuting from London to Oxford daily, a railway freak, unable to buy a ticket without wanting to fall in love, incapable of setting foot on a train without having at once to go in search of the someone it contained who could make it all better brighter newer for a lifetime or an hour or as long as it took to get from Paddington to High Wycombe.

The only journey I can remember making in which I stayed in my seat the whole time and kept my eyelids lowered, was the one that was taken up by my reading of Camilla’s pamphlet on Hardy’s queer elopements. Is it any wonder that I wrote to her?

[3]

In the meantime, between pacing the platforms and corridors of British Rail, waiting for Camilla Marteline’s reply, and wondering if I would ever run into Gertrude Bugler, something happened that compelled me to ask myself yet again whose – since it looked as though I wasn’t Thomas Hardy’s – whose on earth I was then.