The cottage was much too small for her. I don’t just mean for her needs and her comfort; it was too small for her morally and psychologically and spiritually. It made her look clumsy. It asserted the rights of prettiness and daintiness and quaintness over her stark superabundance. It mocked her grandeur. And that, I learned later, was why she chose to live there. It was an act of aggression against herself. Part of her general rebellion. She needed to wage war on everything that had been given to her, and that included the composition and arrangement of her own genes and molecules. Long afterwards, when we used to go house hunting together – like having babies it was either that or break up – we would fight furiously because I aspired to a rambling Victorian Villa on a cliff top and Camilla declined to derelict cowsheds in dripping valleys. She wouldn’t look at anything that had space or elevation. And she was never happier than when we found a one-storey one-room converted sheep-pen constructed of mud and straddling an ancient running ford. We lived there for one whole wet summer, sleeping in shifts – there wasn’t room for two to lie down simultaneously – in wellington boots and urinating through the rotting window frames – there were no windows – into the very stream from which we drew our water. ‘Don’t you just love it here?’ she used to ask me, in a small sweet voice, pouring me afternoon tea in doll’s house china cups which I would empty back into the walls when she wasn’t looking.

But tonight, in her place, we didn’t achieve that sort of intimacy. She was tired from her day at sea and her evening singing, and she didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to kiss or in any other way get to know me better either. ‘You can sleep down here,’ she told me, leaving me in the little prettily beamed and sanded parlour. She didn’t add that she was pleased I’d come or that she hoped I’d stay or that she trusted I’d sleep well. She simply turned abruptly from me, went upstairs, and a moment later tossed me down a sleeping bag.