But all the time I knew that I was in Camilla’s world and that I didn’t choose to make it mine. Hers were the antecedents here, hers the history, hers the friends. I was out on a limb, a new shoot on an old stem, and for some reason I wanted to stay that way. I enjoyed the fragility of my position. I relished not knowing what each new day was going to bring – what threat to my stability, what fresh revelation, what whim that would exclude me. I woke up every morning sick in the stomach. Was this the day that Camilla would finally be bored? Was this the day that she would disclose to me the real nature of her relations to the village plumber? Was this the day that she would at last swim out to that black rock she seemed to need to reach and sit on far more than she seemed to need to reach and sit on me.

Unutterably sweet was the sickness of my uncertainty as I hung retching over the wash basin in the morning, not wanting to wake Camilla but not wanting her to stay asleep either, hoping that she had stirred of her own volition and opened her eyes and was at this very moment spreading herself for me like a forbidden banquet.

Of Camilla as a banquet I will have more to say.

So: although the rocky and populous outside world was an apparent break from the intense mental activity of our investigations of each other’s pasts, for me it offered no real refreshment. It merely served to fan the flames. Pity the poor Jew. Let him gentrify and ruralize himself all he likes, let him surround himself with acres of goyische greenery, he will never know what it is like to take a turn around a garden. For all that I stood on cliff tops and breathed the sea air, for all that I rambled and marvelled and meandered, espied seals and puffins and paddled in crystal streams, I never once left Camilla’s mind.

So pity poor Camilla also.

‘Tell me,’ must have been the two words most often on my lips. ‘Tell me, tell me.’ For just as children pass the parcel or the apple, tucking it from under one chin to another, so I wanted Camilla to pass the poison of her experience from her head into mine. ‘Tell me what you did then. Tell me what he said. Tell me how you felt. Tell me, tell me.’

And Camilla, who was wary of my avidity (and weary of it, too, at last) but who was also amused and understanding initially, and ascendant and therefore punitive, and naturally not unwilling to recall the past pleasures of her life – Camilla told me.