For all the depth and range of her experience, for all the decorations she’d earned and all the despatches she’d been mentioned in, Camilla was not what even her most ardent admirers would have called a busy lover. She bore no resemblance, for example, to those gadfly women who tear from one end of a man’s body to another in a fever of ambition and virtuosity, like a circus plate-spinner, pledged to the tremendous feat of keeping everything up and whirring at the same time – and who, by the by, I lied to Camilla that I had never found particularly satisfactory myself. She did not belong either to that gentler but more rhapsodic band who seek to extract strange worshipful music from the male, the xylorimbists or tympanists or flute players. Essentially – although she was the one who had quite literally kicked us off, prodded me with her big toe while I lay unconscious on her floor, and zipped me clean out of her sleeping bag – essentially she was receptive rather than dynamic. She spread herself each morning as if she were a banquet, succulent, sumptuous, formal (she was always a black tie affair, Camilla), and therefore – since it is not in the nature of banquets that they sit up and bite you back – passive.