Looks are important to Lionel, even though I’m sure his own mother would agree he doesn’t have any. They are given a whole section to themselves in Lad of Destiny, from which one sentence in particular has for some reason lodged itself in my mind. ‘Vanity is a weakness, but so is self-neglect; remember to tense the buttocks hard whenever you are on the telephone or standing in a queue or otherwise not using the body.’ I remember, too, Camilla’s description of the one time she got to see inside his house. He lives in a prefabricated chalet, neighbourless and without electricity, at the very edge of Windy Beak. Here he keeps himself warm and fed by burning driftwood and cooking up bones begged from the village widows whom he charms, or wrenched from the jaws of the village dogs whom he terrifies. He isn’t renowned for hospitality. Camilla had gone to see him to arrange boat trips up the coast for her students – if she could pack them off for an afternoon with Lionel she wouldn’t have to talk to them herself – but he would only let her in on the understanding that there was to be nothing between them. ‘I won’t sleep with you unless I fall in love with you,’ he told her, ‘and there isn’t much likelihood of that.’ Camilla offered to shake hands on it but he wouldn’t chance the contact. He was thinking of her. ‘He’s got an iron bar and a mirror over every doorway,’ she swore to me, ‘so that he can raise himself by his arms and see how he looks every time he passes from one room to the next.’ I snorted. ‘Don’t laugh,’ she said. ‘Living in the country can do that to you. And at least he’s not Cornish.’

I tried to recall Camilla’s words this morning, as I gazed down on Lionel’s sun-baked baldness. He was wearing his white walking shorts, which meant that there were four more pairs to go, and his matted primatial chest was bare. ‘At least he’s not Cornish,’ I said to myself. And that helped me to say, ‘You’re looking fine, Lionel’ to him.

‘Someone just told me I was looking pale.’

‘That’s a calumny, Lionel.’

‘You don’t think I’m overdoing it?’ Lionel has a habit of peppering you with questions about himself and then staring out to sea while you reply. Even when he has initiated the conversation he has a knack of making you feel that you’re keeping him from where he’d rather be – from the three natural sources of his strength. Of course he could have utilized the time I was stealing from him this morning by clenching and unclenching his buttocks – unless that was the very thing he feared he might be overdoing.

‘Overdoing what?’ I asked.