It was true I wasn’t a Ted Hughes fan. If he’d written plays I would almost certainly have walked out of them. But he was an attractive alternative to Harry Vilbert.

However, Sharon seemed to have made up her mind. ‘I think I’ll go ahead with Harry,’ she said. ‘He’s very cheap’ (it actually hadn’t occurred to me until now that we were going to have to pay for Harry Vilbert) ‘and we badly need someone to breathe life into our occult section – it’s gone dead lately.’

That promptly silenced my opposition. How could I be anything but amenable to an argument which bore on stock? The shop was my livelihood as well as Sharon’s, and it deserved to be treated as well as it had so far treated us. It was true that I had given precious hours of sweat and labour to the business, doing paper work, helping Sharon with the ordering, accompanying her to the Booksellers’ Conference and so on, but it was also true that it gave me a blessed freedom from those sorts of drudgery – schoolteaching, probation work, writing drama criticism for the Guardian – that were sapping the energies of my friends. Time was what I had always insisted I wanted, time for the development and expression of my particular gift for analysis and dispute – poo-poohing as Sharon called it – and time had been given to me in plenty. I was only 27. Already I had published over a dozen articles in learned journals, including a blistering attack on the Powys brothers and, if I say so myself, the final word on Emily Brontë. I had a dislike for the English rural tradition. I didn’t care for novels set primarily in the outside, on moors or under greenwood trees, especially if the outside they were set in was somehow also metaphorical, that’s to say was really the inside of something else. My other pet dislike was for works that consisted of people asking Whether There Was Anyone Who Could Tell Them Who They Were. I was terribly intolerant of identity crises. Novels in which characters asked Whether There Was Anyone Who Could Tell Them Who They Were while standing in the outside that was really the inside were, naturally, anathema to me. I only mention this in order to give some idea of how many more articles I felt I had it in me to write, and how necessary it therefore was that Sharon’s bookshop continue to prosper. I suppose you could say that I am justifying myself for having backed down on the issue of Harry Vilbert.

I didn’t back down altogether, though. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Invite the hypnotist. But don’t ask me to have anything to do with him.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Sharon assured me.

‘As long as that’s fully understood.’

‘It’s understood.’