I took this to be a discouraging sign. In more ways than one. I’d never been camping before, not even indoors. And I’m not ashamed to say that this was the first sleeping bag I had ever seen. By and large Jews don’t bother with them; there is something needlessly spartan, to the Jewish mind, about the idea of putting yourself in a bag at bedtime. We prefer to retire with more ceremony. How we managed during those forty years in the desert I don’t know, but I cherish an image of richly festooned marquees, not unlike Sharon’s bedroom, in which the wandering tribes rested their stiff necks on self-ventilating orthopaedic mattresses set on pocket-sprung divans. Comfort, however, wasn’t the only point at issue here. When I say that it is un-Judaic to climb into a sleeping bag I am referring to one’s own sleeping bag; what had been unceremoniously thrown down the stairs to me was someone else’s. I didn’t need to check what the Talmud had to say about that; I possessed in full measure the race’s instinctive dread of those places where other people’s bodies had been and where alien germs were therefore bound to congregate. And I possessed it in the usual illogical form. I would press my lips to absolutely any part of some girl I’d known for five minutes – in my bachelor days it was my boast that, orally speaking, there wasn’t anywhere I hadn’t been and wouldn’t gladly go again – but I’d invent every kind of fantastic excuse rather than lay my head upon her pillow or slide my unclothed body in between her sheets. Witness, then, against what a background of abhorrence, trepidation, and impiety, I ritualistically undressed, opened Camilla’s sleeping bag, stretched myself out inside it, and slowly drew up the zipper. But don’t even attempt to imagine the bliss of infamy and the languor of betrayal which overcame me as I closed my eyes and waited for them to come and bite me – Camilla’s germs.

‘Well?’