It took me some time to know who I was, and where, and why, let alone to recognize the voice of someone who wasn’t me. Only the unfamiliar compression of my limbs, their unaccustomed heat and itchiness, told me that I wasn’t in my flat in Notting Hill Gate; and only the sound of the close encroachments of the sea told me that I wasn’t back in Finchley, being woken up by Sharon. When at last I came round I saw Camilla standing over me. She was wearing a man’s shirt (whose? whose?) which didn’t entirely conceal, not from where I was lying anyway, the thick undergrowth of her sex. I have already said something about the way a woman’s bodily hairs affect me first thing in the morning, and I was at once ready, with the sleep still in my eyes, for another supreme act of self-immolation, of burial and obliteration.

But anyone who has tried to be demonstrative in a sleeping bag will understand something of my plight. I could no more rise this morning from the floor of Camilla’s fairy-tale cottage than I had been able to spring unaided the night before from the settle of The Spattered Sofa. And this time Camilla wasn’t even offering me her arm. ‘Well?’ she enquired again, as I thrashed around on the floor like a forsaken merman, and if I thought I detected impatience in her voice I was right. For the next thing I knew she was actually prodding me – I will not say she was kicking me – with her foot.

Of course, if I’d known anything about sleeping bags I’d have kept calm, sat up, found the zip, and set myself free. As it was it took Camilla to find it for me. ‘For God’s sake stay still, will you,’ she ordered, and taking the zipper between her big toe and its neighbour – believe me, that neighbour would have been a big toe on anybody else – in one smooth deft movement she unseamed me.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s never any good the first time, so let’s get it over with.’