Avice and I must have been two of a kind. She didn’t think there was nobody younger than Harry either. But I still wouldn’t have done what she did. I wouldn’t have spent the whole weekend (not the whole weekend) with Clemency Fanshawe’s acupuncturist husband, Priam, and returned home to Harry on Monday morning with a thousand tiny pin pricks on my body. I wouldn’t have been quite so trusting with Tarquin the tattooist either, I wouldn’t have permitted him so much scope and freedom of artistic expression, so much licence, in his transmogrification of me into the great turning wheel of the Zodiac. And I certainly wouldn’t have chosen my sixteenth birthday, the very day I was legal and entitled to buy my own cigarettes, to run away, back to Finchley of all places, with the headmaster of the local comprehensive school at which Harry had enrolled me, in the evenings, to re-take my CSEs.

It hasn’t been one of the village’s prettier sights, over the last year or so, Harry Vilbert trudging up the hill to Myrtle Cottage on his own, a pathetically empty shopping bag hanging at his side. And don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind that that’s how I look every morning heading off towards Dundagel or the Cliff without a Name. Why do you think I’ve kept out of his way? Why do you think I was so displeased to run into him today when my guard was down? Until now I’ve been able to hold him at bay. Even on those mornings when we’ve been out on the cliffs together, him on one side of the harbour, me on the other, each of us perched on the skulls of those slumbering icthyosauri, looking out to sea, with nobody else awake except Lionel Turnbull, naked below us, reminding us of our common origins in rock and water – even then I’ve managed to avoid any kind of recognition or acknowledgement. I’ve been only too aware of what he was storing up to say to me the minute I showed any sign of being well enough to hear it, the minute I relaxed my vigilance and looked his way. ‘Let’s have a drink together one night. I know what it’s like. I’ve been through it. The pain never goes away, but talking about it helps. Come round and see me. I’m always in. Where else am I going to be? We’ve got a lot in common, you and I. I knew that when I first regressed you. Do you remember that? It seems a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?’

And that’s exactly what he did say to me, a couple of hours ago, word for word – except for some stuff about the depth and dignity of a man’s love and the intrinsic harlotry of women, which I don’t choose to repeat.

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