But it wasn’t entirely my fault. You see, although I am now able to reproduce, having had a few years to think about it, what Camilla said to me, at the time I couldn’t decipher it at all. I’ve always been a preternaturally poor linguist. My ear just refuses to pick up un-English sounds. Even when I’m abroad and expecting them, foreign words take me entirely by surprise. And at home, when I’m unprepared, the simplest unfamiliar vowel throws me completely. I don’t care to think how many lively discussions I’ve brought to an end by asking someone who has made a noise like weltanschauung or vichyssoise if he’d be so kind as to come again. But I couldn’t ask Camilla to do that. You don’t ask a woman who is paying a compliment to your penis (I understood that much) to repeat herself. I might not have been to public school but I had grasped the rudiments of etiquette between the sexes. And besides, I didn’t want her to know how bad my French was. Some things she was bound eventually to find out. But not yet. So I kept my head close to hers, I continued to share her absorption in my engorged and glowing organ, and I sighed a sigh of profound experience and even sadness, as if whatever she’d said touched chords that were best left to throb in silence; and when I felt safe from the folly of inconsequence I hurried quickly, to escape further French conversation, to the shelter of my previous request. ‘I really am very keen to discuss his potency with you, you know,’ was what I said. Only I did my best to empty my voice of all urgency as to Hardy, and at the same time to retain all fervour as to Camilla. I wanted it to sound as though we were a couple of madly in-love botanists who still had things to say to each other about the reproductive habits of the mollusc.

Camilla, though, reacted badly. She pulled my shirt down, pulled her own shirt down, and moved away from me to the window. I realise now that she was disappointed, that she had hoped for de Sade and been lumbered with the other chap; but I wasn’t to know that at the time. I simply thought she was getting ready to love me for myself and was gazing out of her window only because she found a metaphor for her burgeoning passion in the irresistible tumult of the sea.

‘Fucking Thomas Hardy,’ I was therefore not prepared to hear her murmur.

Then, before I’d made up my mind whether I ought to get her to repeat that, she turned around somewhat wearily, all traces of lewdness vanished, and asked me how long I’d got.

‘How long have I got for what?’