‘I thought it never would decay.

Until a saucy fiddler he chanced to pass my way,

And stole away my bonnie bunch of thyme.’

I felt suddenly and unaccountably sick. If I had not been carrying drinks I might have doubled up with pain. To this day I can locate with my fingers the place where a hole seemed to open up in my stomach. It is still sore. And what caused it was not Camilla’s immersion in the life of the village, making her remote from me – I soon learned anyway that she was as determinedly estranged as I was; nor was it her familiarity with the local men who patted her back and stroked her arms as if they knew from memory every bend and turn and hollow of her. No, though these things all hurt me, ludicrously, what opened me up in the middle was the sad mocking fatalism of that song and Camilla’s submission to its truths. There and then she provided me with an image of menace and impermanence and careless theft that has never left me: the saucy fiddler. I had always believed, even though I had not stopped to slug it out with Rowland Fitzpiers, that I could make myself as dazzling as any man to a woman if the situation required it. I was even prepared to take on Norman Mailer, remember, when Camilla posed him as a possible threat. But I knew my limits. I couldn’t handle fleet-footed impishness. I couldn’t hope to defeat the saucy fiddler. I had no answer, from the start, to the melancholy sexual jauntiness, irresistible to even the best of women because it knew the sources of woman’s unchanging weakness, of the Celt. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t suppose for one moment that such a thing actually existed, any more than I shared its insolent pastoral certainties about female frailty. What scooped out a great hole in my insides was the realization that Camilla did.

[3]

If Camilla were here she wouldn’t let me get away with that.

‘The saucy fiddler stalks the peripheries of your dread, not mine,’ she would tell me. Only she wouldn’t use those exact words. Peripheries of dread was my sort of language, not hers.

‘But Camilla, I’m only frightened of what he could do to you because you’re frightened of what he could do to you.’

‘Frightened? Who’s frightened? I’m not frightened!’ She had a buccaneering, ready-for-anything look, which she would almost certainly have shown me at this point.

And which wouldn’t have offered me much in the way of consolation. ‘That’s what I mean. That’s why I’m frightened.’

‘And what do you fear he’d do to me, this saucy fiddler?’

Camilla could make the idea of anyone doing anything to her seem pretty far-fetched.

But nothing is impossible to the imagination of a dotard. ‘Steal you away, for a start.’