The Alternative Centre for Thomas Hardy Studies was not open when I arrived at it; neither was its souvenir and coffee shop. Local people I quizzed were ironical when I asked if they knew the whereabouts of the proprietor or when the doors of her establishment were due to be unbolted. I gathered she was notorious not just for keeping irregular hours but for keeping no hours whatsoever. If the day was at all fine she would be off in her two-seater sports car or out in the harbour fishing, regardless of the number of people queuing outside for cream teas and engraved replicas of the tiny picnic-tumbler that Thomas and Emma lost, while they were courting, between boulders in the Valency river. Later, when I knew her better, I came to understand that staying closed was more than just a convenience for her – it was a satisfaction in itself, an unassociated pleasure, an act of pure disinterested violence against the public. Sometimes I have seen her sitting at a desk inside her locked premises, clearly visible, with all the lights on, while disbelieving visitors hammered at her doors. The expression on her face, on those occasions, can only be described as beatific. Locals didn’t know what to think. In so far as those I conversed with could be said to have an attitude it was one of bemused and grudging admiration; they didn’t like high-handedness, especially in a woman, but then they didn’t like visitors either. They were squeezed on every side, like all inhabitants of remote places, by their conflicting prejudices; and this was nowhere more evident than in their responses to the famous episode of the coachload of mature Japanese students from Osaka who, arriving early one morning at the Centre for a week’s tuition – booked and paid for months in advance – and finding it shut up and unattended, no messages or apologies or directions left, sat on their cases in the porch and waited without a word of complaint until sunset. Such a sight could not fail to stimulate the nationalism inherent in rustic ribaldry, yet it at the same time quickened resentment of Camilla. She wasn’t offering a very good example of country hospitality was she? – leaving all those Nips parched and starving in the lane. Especially as, according to all accounts, she was not in the slightest bit nonplussed when she returned to find them waiting for her. ‘And so ends day one of your course,’ she apparently told them, bronzed and tired herself and carrying a plastic bag full of writhing mackerel over her shoulder. ‘Now you know something of the adversity, the frustration of expectation in a harsh terrain, suffered by Hardy’s tragic protagonists. Tomorrow, if the weather holds, we’ll do indifference and neglect.’