I did what I could not to look too out of place as Camilla’s fishermen friends tied up below me. On the other hand I wanted to look sufficiently distinct to be noticed. I leaned against the old wall and loosened my tie. I tapped my foot on a stump of weathered timber as if I knew every grain and knot of it, as if it had been me or one of my forbears who had hewn and tarred it moons ago. It’s not even entirely out of the question that I whistled shanties. But although Camilla looked in my direction a couple of times – she was abandoned by the gulls now that she had run out of offal, and was doing something expert but I reckoned unnecessary with coils of rope – she did not appear to recognize me. It had been altogether different for Hardy. The moment he rang at the rectory door Emma Gifford was arrested by his familiar (her first word was homely) appearance – as though she had already seen him in a dream. He was what she was waiting for. Whereas Camilla didn’t seem to be waiting for anything, unless it was a beer with the boys. But then Emma Gifford must have been growing a touch jumpy in the social seclusion in which she’d been placed and must have been wondering, at thirty, if her great moment had passed; and Hardy was as we know him always to have been, his nether lip pumping blood, the manuscript of an unfinished poem poking out of his pocket. They were both, that’s to say, in a more susceptible state than we were, or at least than Camilla was and I should have been – given my contention that romance was no less a deliberate act of the will, a measured response to the pressures of the market, than going fishing.

I decided that I couldn’t wait for ever to be recognized. ‘Ahoy there!’ I shouted, recalling the seafaring literature of my youth; but Camilla and her myrmidons looked so startled that I was glad I had hung back on ‘Me hearties!’

‘Gertrude Bugler, if I’m not mistaken,’ I said instead, which wasn’t just me being droll – I was possessed by a sudden and not entirely honourable need to remind her of the intellectual threads that bound her to me, and not those deep water fisherfolk.