Well, she was a shock tactician. They would never have granted her tenure at most English universities. But she knew how to send a current through me. Her drawing galvanized me. I sat at my desk with my hair erect and light coming out of my fingers. If I needed further proof that my ties with Thomas Hardy were not familic, then here it was; not I, nor anybody else for that matter, could be connected to him through that channel – not I, nor anybody else living or dead, could claim kinship with him via that organ of transmission, emblazoned on the blackboard in shocking technicolour pink. But that wasn’t the only reason for my soaring temperature and the odour that I must have been giving off, to anyone in the row in front of me, of charred fingernails and singed flesh. Don’t forget that these were the second pudenda I had looked into in one morning, and that Camilla had had, so to speak, a hand in each of them. It was impossible for me to avoid the conclusion that without in any way deviating from Hardy’s detailed instructions Camilla had drawn herself for me. In public! Can you take the full measure of what that meant? I couldn’t. I was rapidly losing all sense of distinction between reality and art. It required all my powers of restraint not to leap from my desk and mount that blackboard. And years afterwards, stirred by some fugitive association, I would rummage between Camilla’s legs in search of the smell and the taste of schoolroom chalk.

Is it any wonder that I am consumed by loss? Do you think I don’t know how unlikely it is that I will ever again find a woman who will do for me what Camilla did?

The ladies, naturally, were not as carried away by Camilla’s demonstration as I was. I wasn’t paying them an awful lot of attention but I had the impression that they were thawing out a bit. And I do remember that one of their number actually found the courage to applaud. But of this I am confident: they’d recognize aggressive misogynistic timidity when they next saw it, and they’d know what they were reading about when they next came across the crystallized wattles of turkeys in a so-called children’s book.