Camilla brought me toast to the table and subjected me to a long slow smile of recognition. The obscene tangle of her pubic hair, still visible beneath her shirt but less tightly curled than it had been when she stood over me and prodded me with her foot – a touch dewier now and more straggly – was on a level with my eyes. She stood dead still so that I could breathe in her aroma and see the cleft fleshy swell of her, and she actually followed my gaze with her own, so that for a short while the pair of us were united in one single act of shameless contemplation. ‘For all the commanding authority of my personality,’ she appeared to be inviting me to notice, ‘for all my stature and assurance and contempt, look in what a primitive and vulnerable spot even my forces must muster, behold the soft pink quiver of even my mystery. Isn’t the contrast lewd?’

This moment should have been the crown and consummation of all my sexual hopes and aspirations. I had been trying to get other people to see the lewdness of the human body all my life. I had been baulked at every turn by jollity, blank incomprehension, lyricism, or sheer bloody-minded wholesomeness. Now here I was, being granted everything I had ever wanted – do you know, Camilla and I were so undivided in our scrutiny of her mystery, so one-eyed as it were, that our faces were actually touching, we were actually forehead to forehead, indistinguishable in almost every regard from a pair of fond parents peering into a crib and waiting for the first gurgle (now that’s what I call obscenity) – and what did I do? In what manner did I give thanks to the Gods for twinning me with a kindred soul at last, when Camilla turned our attentions from what was lewdly stirring under her shirt to what was lewdly materializing under mine, glued our foreheads once more together, and said, ‘Alors, tu bandes, tu bandes, mon propre sale seigneur’?

Well, must I really divulge what I did? Let me hide my shame in brackets. (I returned to the subject of Thomas Hardy – ill-fated undeserving lunatic that I was.)