I came to know something of the animate nature in the village also in these first months. The hostility which had greeted Camilla when she had first moved in and driven seasoned salts to offer her shares in their boats had not passed exactly – it takes half a hundred years for the Cornish to think about relaxing their suspicions – but she had been resident long enough to have lost some of her first dangerousness. Most husbands were still with their wives, and those that had left had left with someone else. And because holiday idylls are not, after all, uncommon, Jaimie wasn’t the only farm boy hereabouts who got drunk every night and slept in a ditch, unable to resolve the mystery of whether he had in fact possessed a worldly bride for a day or had dreamt it. So there were no more pins stuck in her effigy in crumbling cob cottages, no more polythene bags of chicken giblets left on her front step, and no more talk of her being drummed out of the village by the local women, gathering in the lanes and hammering their pans and kettles with wooden spoons. She was still subject to withering looks from some of the older inhabitants, but she could buy provisions without inconvenience now, she could pat the village dogs, she could turn up at fêtes and carnivals, and she could even get herself elected a parish councillor to sit alongside the plumber, the electrician, the malevolent gardener, the ladies’ hairdresser, the retired angling correspondent, and the deep-voiced village sculptress. I wasn’t a nobody therefore when I strolled about on Camilla’s arm and was introduced to the local doctor and the local vet – both of them from up-country, far gone in the eccentricity of professional boredom, and indistinguishable, one from the other, even to themselves (though it was said the vet was better qualified); the potter and the slate painter, Ken Stinsford; the Restaurateur (his capital letter) from West Bromwich who was going to teach the Cornish how to Eat; the sad-eyed proprietor of the rock and ice-cream shop who held us in urgent conversation about recent developments in the French nouveau roman as he twisted interminable threads of sugar into candy floss; and any number of Camilla’s favourite musical codgers and sentimental blatherers from the pubs and fields and wharves. The vicar said good morning to me, which had never happened in Finchley. The families from the remotest farms, who came in once a month to shop and who had interbred so resolutely that the baby looked older than the grandma and in all probability was, smiled at us in the streets and touched their hats. I was so much not a nobody in fact that I actually grew to be on nodding terms – though the confession shames me – with the area representatives of the National Trust who drove around in Land Rovers and hacking jackets and brandished sticks like officers of an occupying army. Which in a sense they were.