I suppose that was the moment that was granted me to be master of my fate. I could have turned my back on her and walked up the hill the way I’d come, collected my suitcases from the rancid postmaster, and kicked the seaweed of Castle Boterel from off my shoes for ever. Alternatively there was still time for me to leap snarling and unbuttoned into her boat, bend her over the gunwhale, and take her illegally before a single one of her flabbergasted fisher-friends could raise a rod. As it was I did neither. I simply stood my ground and flushed scarlet. I didn’t even remember to be flattered that she knew so much about me, so taken aback was I by the easy scorn with which she appeared to judge my conduct. This was the first time it had been brought home to me that my abandonment of Sharon to Fitzpiers, along with the house, the shop, the electrical appliances, the insurance policies, the co-ordinated kitchenware, my books, my trivial fond records, and my baby (that’s if it was my baby), could be construed as weakness. Until now I had seen it as an act of a free and generous spirit – not existential bravery exactly, but something along those lines. I had given, I had disencumbered, I had – a little high-handedly perhaps – dispensed. I was not good but I was grand. Camilla, however, did not appear to see it that way at all. Unless, that is, calling somebody the Mayor of Casterbridge was her idea of a compliment. I didn’t think so. There wasn’t anything obviously complimentary in her manner. It was the schmuck who couldn’t organize a garden party, who couldn’t keep the affections of his friends and lovers, who gave dead birds for wedding presents and asked that no flours be planted on his grave – even de Sade asked for acorns and knew how to spell – it was that Mayor of Casterbridge that she seemed to have in mind, not some saturnine heroic figure striding the moors alone. There’s more than one way of looking at grandeur. I might have been a starved goldfinch myself, the way Camilla looked at me.

So what brings you here anyway?’ she asked at last, pointing her knife in my direction, not so much sorry for my discomfiture as plain bored by it.

I wondered. So did her friends the fishermen. So even, it seemed to me, did the aimless holiday-makers who would stand and stare at anything (I said they should have been in Brighton) and who had not dispersed with any of the prompt tact and restless self-interest of the seagulls. All of them clearly knew the whole history of my moral capitulations so far and were only curious now to discover what I was going to relinquish next. ‘You,’ I therefore said in answer to Camilla’s question.

[2]