I think it’s time I set the record straight about my reputation for dishonesty. I was nothing like so big a liar as Camilla said I was, or indeed as I allowed her to say I was. I don’t know whether the fact that I lied about my lying means that I was more honest than I pretended to be, or less, but the truth is that I encouraged Camilla not to trust me in order to make myself more interesting to her. I wanted to frighten her with duplicity – that’s to say with the double-deception of my duplicity – in exact proportion as she frightened me with truth. One can only fight with the weapons that one has; the truth of Camilla’s life – her teeming past (of which she spared me not a solitary gasp or shudder), the volatility of her present (the ever beckoning black rock, the saucy fiddling fishermen, the never-absent threat that I might be banished to the sleeping bag) – quite simply riveted me; the truth of my life was therefore simply that: I was riveted. Remember the hammer and the anvil? I had gone one better – I was the rivet in between. I was put in my place, beaten, hammered, heated, and secured. And I liked it. I thrilled to every thwack. I got up in the morning, hung over the sink, returned to find the banquet of Camilla either spread or not spread for me, put in eight hours fighting back the damp that rose up the walls of the Alternative Centre for Thomas Hardy Studies, and came home at night and waited for the blow to fall. If the English language had never so far needed the word uxoriating, it needed it then, because that was what I was doing, long before I was a husband – luxuriating in the supremacy of a wife. I was an uxoromantic, a luxoriator, a disenfranchised subject under close house arrest of the despotic state of Luxorembourg. Which was fine for me but not so good – I wasn’t a fool – for Camilla. Nothing bores a despot quicker than a vassal. Why else are they always restless and sad-eyed? I knew full well that I didn’t dare look the thing I was. So I lied a bit. I let it look as though I was something else entirely. I affected the air of a man who kept secrets. I ran downstairs early to collect the mail and made frantic rustling sounds and stuffed innocuous circulars into my back pockets. ‘What are you hiding?’ Camilla would demand to know, as I did a perfect imitation of dripping guilt. And sometimes, just to add starch and leavening to my performance, I would slip away and do the thing I wasn’t really lying when I said I had not stomach for. I didn’t dare get caught, of course, with my hands on the hips of Trixie Trewarmett who pulled pints behind the bar of The Unwelcome Traveller and called me ‘Me ’andsome’, but I equally didn’t dare be believed when I swore I would never dream of doing such a thing. If Camilla had once got wind that I was telling the truth – that’s when I was telling the truth – then it would have been all up with us. On those rare occasions that I slipped away to give myself something actual to lie about, I was doing it for her – and that is the truth.