Ths boat she loomed in burned on the water. If the poop was not beaten gold I don’t know what it was; but I can’t tell you if there were sails or oars, or how many pretty smiling fishermen dimpled on each side of her. I saw only Camilla. As did the holiday-makers who had thronged the wharfs to watch her come in, drawn not by her strange invisible perfume – Camilla was theatrical, not meretricious – but by the hundreds of white squalling gulls, seemingly lured from the whole stretch of coast, which wheeled and swooped and dipped around her as she towered in the boat, her arms outstretched, her silken hair streaming, her laughter mingling with their desolate cries. I was astonished that she didn’t fear for her eyes, so close did they come to her, some of them brushing her shoulders, others hovering fractionally in flight to pause on her palms and forearms. Later she explained that she had been gutting the catch at sea (in accordance with the wishes of the fishermen, by the by; she herself believed in bringing the fish in whole) and that the gulls were simply feeding from her, on the heads and tails and innards of mackerel. It was a little miracle, she told me, how infinitesimally accurate with their bills such large birds could be, how they could swoop and take what they wanted from her hands and not injure her in the slightest. Such accuracy, I was to discover, was also expected of me when it was my turn to approach Camilla with my bill. Grand and generous as were the expanses of her body, she was quickened only in minute and hidden recesses which it was my task to find with prompt and intuitive precision, much as if I were a great bird in flight myself. And Camilla had no patience for clumsiness or approximations; one millimetre to the left or right, one centigramme too little pressure (or too much), and that could be a whole summer’s happiness down the drain. But I knew nothing of any of this as Camilla’s boat came nearer to me, and I certainly didn’t think of the gulls as creatures who cared only for their stomachs; even now they still figure in my imagination, as they wheeled around Camilla’s imperious head, as animistic worshippers, bacchantes in some pantheistic ritual, acknowledging Camilla’s divinity, protecting her, revering her, and of course longing for her. There was no mistaking the hopeless yearning melancholy of their cry, that desolate call from their genetic incarceration, victims of the cruel caprices of the incontestable Gods – I knew exactly, standing overdressed on that jetty in the heat, how they felt.