For a numerologist she could be very literal. And I really did have a point that I wanted to make. ‘Listen, Sharon,’ I said to her, putting more than usual authority into my voice, ‘my own body is a vast machinery of mysteries and minor miracles to me. Its every function astounds me. See, I can crook my little finger within an infinitesimal fraction of a second from the moment I decided I would like to crook it. If I want to stamp my foot, look, I can stamp my foot. How can this be? Sharon, if I were to put my mind to it – and putting one’s mind to something is also a miraculous little activity – I would be filled with reverence for myself every time I moved a muscle.’

‘Which isn’t very often.’

‘It might not be often, Sharon, but if we are going in for astonishment it is astonishing I can do it at all. Right now, even as I speak, thousands of tiny valves are opening and closing in obscure corners of me, without my even asking them to. So what am I supposed to do – consider myself to be a prodigy just because I work?’

‘All right, stop shouting.’

‘I’m not shouting.’ I’m sure I wasn’t shouting. ‘Sharon, we’re both approaching thirty; between us we’re almost sixty. That’s old enough to know that nothing is amazing because everything is.’

That was meant to be the end of it. Had we been a television programme the credits would have started to roll. But Sharon was dogged this morning. ‘You don’t want to know how you came to get Martha Brown’s name right?’

I shook my head.

‘You don’t want to know how you were able to describe accurately the dress she was wearing?’

I shook my head.

‘You’re not curious about the date even?’

I poured myself some coffee.

‘Do you realise that August 9th was the day on which Martha Brown was hung and you were hypnotized by Harry Vilbert?’

‘A black day for both of us,’ I replied. I couldn’t stay silent all morning. ‘But you can’t make much of the coincidence, Sharon. Her August 9th was 1856, mine was 1967. If you could have managed an exact hundred years anniversary I might have been impressed, as it is –’

‘As it is the difference is 111 years, and you don’t need me to tell you that 111 is the devil’s number.’

With which she rose from the breakfast table and left me, whereupon the credits, this time, really did begin to roll.

But in twenty minutes she was down again, dressed all in black and looking dangerous. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘we’re not sixty between us, we’re fifty-five and a half. Make what you like of that.’

God knows, I tried to.