But her response was always the same. ‘Shit, Banjo!’ she would say, letting me go. ‘Don’t be a fuckwit!’

The masochistic pleasures, I discovered, were no easier of attainment than the sadistic ones. I could see why the Chevalier and the Marquis had ended their days without too many friends or comforts in provincial lunatic asylums. Other people are incorrigibly unco-operative when it comes to ministering to specific needs; it’s a lonely, hopeless, heartbreaking business trying to get someone to give you the precise thing you require.

But I got lucky. The Gods – notorious degenerates themselves – must have been watching over me. Just about the time that I was growing sick of Dawn’s good nature I received the package of pamphlets I’d been waiting for, together with an invitation to look in on her if ever I was passing – passing Castle Boterel? – from Camilla Marteline. And that seemed to promise me assurance that I was not destined to spend the second half of my life alone and crazed, with no one to beat me or be beaten by me, in a home for the criminally ungratified. You see I recognized the handwriting. (Hadn’t I, in some hidden corner of myself, always known that I would?) Camilla Marteline was none other than Gertrude Bugler – or rather, to get them in their proper order of appearance, Gertrude Bugler was none other than Camilla Marteline.

And both of them – even now I still think of Camilla as a pair – remembered me. ‘Still harping on the good little Thomas Hardy,’ they were surprised to notice. ‘Does that mean you’ve disowned the filthy Frenchman? Pity. We’re short of well-connected continentals down here. Look me up though, if ever you’re passing, in any of your incarnations.’

Look her up? She even seemed to possess an instinctive understanding of my taste in prepositions.

Hope, indistinguishable from panic, fluttered at my heart. Love, inseparable from terror, bobbed like a coracle in my stomach. If I’d been able to hold my hand steady I would have made out a will. I had nothing to leave, but that still didn’t stop me wanting to leave it to Camilla.