I must say that I would have preferred a warmer demonstration of appreciation, but I didn’t feel entirely deflated; I wasn’t being prodded with her foot any more, for one thing, and for another I quickly grasped something about this business-like attitude she adopted to our first naked encounter. She assumed an air of briskness and rationality about her body because in fact, when it came right down to bodies, she wasn’t in the slightest bit calm or self-possessed. Sharon had been able to luxuriate cheerfully in her own nudity because her body struck her as a pleasant and amenable object in her life. She was on free and easy terms with it. It gave her extreme pleasure and excitement all right but always of an overt and even sociable kind. Think of how readily she accepted Fitzpiers’s presence in our bed for example, how unshocking she invariably found it. Camilla’s body, on the other hand, and all it could do and have done to it, showed her a clear route down to hell. For all its familiarity to her, for all that she soaped and sponged it every day, she was still overpowered by the obscenity of the structure that was her. You might say that in despite of time and experience she had retained some essential characteristic of original childhood sinfulness. Like me she had never been seduced by the twin imps of naturalness and health. We had both of us not come even close to losing our first profane innocence.

And I reckon that we knew that about each other as we wrestled in the sleeping bag on the floor in sight and sound of the sea. It was our first and our last blind coupling. Hereafter we would look upon every inroad that the one made into the other – every swollen inch that I travelled into her, every finger’s length of her invasion of me – with wide eyes and gasps of appalled complicity. Whenever I think back upon our lovemaking now the image that most frequently returns to me is of Camilla below me, always below me, but trying to sit up, craning her neck so as not to miss a single detail of the outrageous drama of penetration.

All of this, however, was before us. At the time the important thing for me was that I felt strong and confident enough to get the request I had come down with off my chest. ‘I would like to hear you expound your views,’ I said as I drank my coffee, ‘on the question of Thomas Hardy’s virility.’ I recall that there wasn’t so much as a tremor in my voice. My curiosity could not have been more academic. But since I’d started there was no reason for me not to finish. ‘I was very taken by what you wrote in your pamphlets on the unlikeliness of his ever having had the necessary whatever to sire offspring.’