More guilt.

[3]

And Camilla? Did she not encourage me to send little pink woolly bootees and musical nursery mobiles up to Finchley, on the off-chance that it was in fact one lone long-swimming spermatozoon of mine that was the cause of all the loving care and consternation which day and night shook the Sharon-Fitzpiers ménage?

Did Camilla not stay my hand as I was about to toss the latest of the fortnightly photographs into the bin, and urge me to position it instead alongside all the other memoranda of the heart that filled our mantelpiece?

Did she not whisper in my ear, as we lay without our clothes beneath the waterfall or in a field beside a tree in Parrett Down, ‘A father’s love is even more sacred yet, my dear,’ and get me, trouserless, to write the little one a hefty cheque?

No.

[4]

In order to discover whether I had it in me to deliver a straight sentence Camilla deliberately refused to remember who Asimova was.

‘Who’s this Assimovna person?’ she would ask me, when the name, perchance, arose.

For me that was like being asked to give the plot of all three parts of the Oresteia in one sentence. And I had to censor it too, don’t forget. Camilla had to be spared as well as enlightened. ‘You remember Sharon,’ I would say. ‘Well she claimed …’

Camilla always stopped me here. ‘You mean this Akimono is your daughter?’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ I was at pains to explain. ‘You have to remember that relations between Sharon and …’

‘Yes, yes, so she’s not your daughter’.

That didn’t seem to me quite to get it either. ‘Things are not so black and …’

‘Yes they are. It’s only with you that they’re not. But I’ll tell you what: if you ever do work out your relations to this – what’s her name again? Quasimodo? – write them down so that we can both remember.’

I never failed to get angry at this point. It didn’t matter where we were. We could be sitting in the grass in the valley at sunset, with squirrels running over our feet. ‘I know precisely what my relations to Asimova are,’ I would thunder. Most women would have quaked, believe me.

Camilla, though, didn’t turn a hair or bat an eyelid. ‘Barney, you don’t know what your relations are to your own prick,’ she would tell me.

But she was wrong there: I knew a state of grovelling subservience when I saw one.

Taken all round, relations – the actual people themselves as well as the abstract idea – were not our best subject. And that wasn’t only because Camilla wasn’t keen on mine – ‘I only wasn’t keen because you weren’t clear,’ I can hear her objecting – but anyway, whatever she was to mine she was positively barbarous towards her own.