‘You can now see the significance of the role of the Man who had Failed,’ Camilla concluded. ‘The Failure he proudly wears, like a badge, is a failure, in Hardy’s words, of energy. He is a not uncommon figure in Hardy’s works. He represents the superior moral worth of enervation. He is the apotheosis of impotence. What a humiliation it must have been for Emma Hardy to have lived with a man who yearned every day of their life together to channel his stream into another bed but lacked the force to do so and called his inertia sagacity. A faithless husband is a shame to a wife but a husband who is ineffectively adulterous, who wants but lacks the courage to take, dishonours her ineradicably. After Emma’s death Thomas Hardy found amongst her papers a mass of diary entries gathered together under the title, “What I think of my Husband”. You won’t be surprised to learn that he destroyed them. His remorse for his wife is famous, but it wasn’t strong enough to allow her to have her say. People have often speculated as to the contents of those diaries. It isn’t necessary. I know what she wrote. I know what She thought of her Husband.’

[2]

Later that day I took the step of deciding to stay in Castle Boterel. Camilla made it easier for me by driving me a few miles out of the village so that we could talk and drink together far from the farmers and fishermen and the saucy fiddlers whose familiarity with her troubled me so much. As indeed it troubled her. ‘It’s good to get away,’ she said.

I thought I recognized our whereabouts from the signpost. ‘Isn’t this where he felt bad about feeling good that he had made a rival jealous?’ I asked.

‘No, that was Trewill.’

‘What’s this then?’

‘This? This is Trewont.’

We ate chips and pasties out of a basket, and at Camilla’s insistence swilled them down with champagne in celebration of the deal we’d struck. I’d clean out the toilets at the school and make sure there was fresh soap in the wash bowls and paint the window frames and help out with the paper work – I now see that it was not unlike the arrangement I had arrived at with Sharon – in return for which she would keep me happy and sheltered and warm until boredom set in on either side.

‘Do I stay in the sleeping bag?’ I asked.

Camilla thought about it. ‘Not all the time,’ she said at last. And to mark the bounteousness of her concession she got me to fetch her more champagne.