She wasn’t kidding. What has to be understood about Camilla is that she was a puritan. She was fixated on truth. She would neither embellish it nor censor it. It was up to me, since I’d asked, to deal with what she told me as best I could. And detumescent, I dealt badly. I suffered. Oh, how I suffered! For I was the lonely one in that excruciating triangle which linked me, Camilla, and veracity. The other two had each other, lay locked in an indissoluble embrace, while I groaned vulnerable and flaccid, yearning for denials, but unable to find any refuge from the relentless honesty of Camilla’s narrative. On and on she would go, leaving out nothing, not altering an action or a word, not willing to change the length or colour of a single hair, and all with precisely the same degree of artless intimacy and amusement that had aroused me when I’d been armed and helmeted to ride into the very eye of her storm – only now I was defenceless and in a foreign field, without a kingdom or a horse.

Of course, nobody is a compulsive truth-teller for no reason. Truth doesn’t insist that you keep talking. He (she?) can’t possibly feel betrayed by occasional bouts of judicious silence. So I wasn’t in much doubt that Camilla was garrulous over and above the call of verisimilitude; that she was paying me back for trying to assert my will over her past, for supposing that her erotic history and imagination should be at my beck and call. ‘Don’t think you can transcribe my tunes for your organ,’ she once told me.

As it happened I was at that moment hot for her. (At that moment? – at what moment wasn’t I?) ‘Which other instruments do you want them to be played on then?’ I demanded to be told, as I penned her in a corner and ground my ear into her lips.

Two hours later she was still going through the orchestra while I lay whimpering on the carpet.