‘To hear what I have to say about Thomas Hardy’s virility.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘All the time in the world,’ I said. I thought it best not to mention that I’d come down on a one-way ticket though.

‘Well it won’t take that long. But why don’t you come to the class I’m giving this morning on Our Exploits at West Poley?’

‘Our what?’

‘It’s a children’s story that Hardy wrote for an American family magazine. It was lost for years. Someone’s just dug it up.’

I wondered if that someone was Rowland Fitzpiers. It even crossed my mind that Sharon might have got him to do the forgery that I wouldn’t. But Camilla was in no doubt as to its authenticity. ‘Oh it’s his,’ she assured me. ‘There’s no mistaking the dead hand of the master.’

‘And it’s a children’s story, you say?’

Camilla could hear me winding up my little jeu d’esprit. ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ she said. ‘All his stories are children’s stories. But this one has a special interest, because where all the others are meant to be for adults and aren’t, this one isn’t meant to be for adults but is.’

‘You mean it’s really about virility?’ I wondered.

Camilla looked at me. She’d clearly had a lot of experience of dealing with people who thought she was fanciful because she was serious. She seemed sombre, impenetrable. Once again it was hard to believe that there was any part of her that was pink and soft. ‘It’s a story about caves and potholes,’ she said. ‘It’s about going underground. When a novelist who has always more of himself concealed than an iceberg decides, literally, on a subterranean action, then one must lower oneself down with him. The plot centres, by the way, on the damning of rivers.’

She was, as I have said elsewhere, a committed Freudian. And I was becoming a committed Camillarite. I opened my eyes wide. I seemed suddenly to know more than I’d ever known I’d known on the significance of damning rivers. ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I can’t wait to go to your lecture.’ And I rose from the table and went over to where Camilla now stood and I set off in search of her moist and vulnerable areas. But she didn’t have any. I’d blown my chance. She was thinking of Thomas Hardy now and she was hard and closed to all men.

Chapter III

CHAPTER III

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