I don’t expect that I will ever again meet a person who drank champagne in such quantities as Camilla. She guzzled it. And it wasn’t as though she was a connoisseur. She couldn’t tell one champagne from another. It was even possible, when funds were low, to palm her off with cheap sparkling wines from Portugal. She wasn’t an alcoholic either. And she certainly wasn’t a romantic. I think she drank it quite simply because she needed the sensation of bubbles going off inside her mouth. It made her feel that existence was not totally without excitement; that there were things exploding somewhere in her life. There was a gaudy streak in her. She would have made a marvellous wartime mistress, alternately thrashing and sobbing on a broken bed in the glare of searchlights, waiting for the Gestapo to knock.

So why had she settled like a moth of peace in Castle Boterel, where people came on pilgrimages to ashen melancholy, to walk their pets and boil lentils and expire?

‘I fell in love with the idea of an idyll,’ she told me. ‘I came on a sort of working holiday, to continue my researches into Emma Hardy in the daytime – there were descendants of her family I wanted to interview, and relations of a young farmer who courted her before Hardy did – and to get drunk at night. I was working on a book about Hardy’s women then, hence Gertrude Bugler’ – we looked deep into each other’s eyes at the mention of this name – ‘and had other places to visit. I didn’t plan to stay here. But I made the old mistake of confusing a holiday with life. I loved the beauty of the harbour and the valley, and I loved getting drunk here. I fished, I swam, I sang in the pubs, and I was on a grant from the Arts Council. It was like paradise. I suppose too that I wouldn’t have been so willing to stay if I’d had anything better to go back to.’

I didn’t seek to plumb this mystery there and then; I knew I would hear it all eventually. I still was not thirty years of age, remember; I could still luxuriate in the length of time it took to get to know another person. I still wanted to take into myself, slowly, as a precious possession, someone else’s past.

Now if a woman wants to tell me about herself and her adventures – not that I meet many women down here – I stop her mouth, it doesn’t matter with what, with food or kisses or French wine. That’s one thing I can thank Camilla for: she gave me my fill of the sweets of female narrative. Hers still hangs around my heart like a fatality.