I suddenly began to feel anxious. I couldn’t remember what lies I’d tried to persuade Camilla to swallow about Sharon and Finchley and Fitzpiers. I’d sworn to her a thousand times that until I met her I’d never had women troubles, that I hadn’t cared for any woman enough to be troubled by her. Sharon, she had to understand, was just a youthful error. Yes, all right, a youthful error with big tits, but still an error. Camilla didn’t believe a word I said to her – by the time we’d known each other this long I couldn’t even get her to trust me when I told her the time – but that still didn’t mean that I could feel comfortable having Harry Vilbert at our table blurting out his version of my past.

‘Well I don’t know what troubles you’ve left in Finchley,’ I said, coldly, ‘but mine had nothing to do with women.’

Fortunately he was more interested in his life than he was in mine. ‘Oh, I haven’t left my troubles behind me,’ he explained. I thought I caught the signs on his face of one of those implosions of idolatrous pride to which erotomaniacal men (erotoleptics, Hardy called them) are subject – especially when they are of advanced years and their teeth are going. We were at that stage where, if Harry had left his troubles in Finchley, we would have been compelled to look at photographs; as it was, since he’d brought them with him, I guessed correctly that we were about to be invited to meet them in the flesh.

‘She’d be grateful for a visit,’ he said. ‘She hasn’t been out since we got here. We’re just up the hill in Myrtle Cottage. Will you come?’

Camilla would not be removed from a pub until a good two hours after closing time. ‘Why don’t you bring her here?’ she suggested.

He gave us both a wild stare. ‘I can’t,’ he said. I will never forget the way he managed to look defeated and defiant, crumpled and contemptuous, all at once. He pushed his face close to ours and somehow managed to get us huddled like conspirators. ‘I daren’t,’ he whispered, when he was certain that no one else could hear.

Camilla and I exchanged glances. Each of us was waiting for the other to do the decent indecent thing. ‘Why?’ we both asked together.