That’s not meant to sound in any way like a complaint. I did not begrudge Camilla her passivity. I was, as I approached my thirtieth year, a different person from the boy who spied on Rabika Flatman as she swung from the crossbar of her hammock and hoped that she would hoist him up on to her nipple as a punishment. I was nearing maturity. With the help of Dawn from Brisbane I now knew what I reasonably could and couldn’t expect a woman to do to me. In a sense it was Dawn who sounded the knell over the hopeless optimism of my youth. She was my last fling with the idea of athletic womanhood. Camilla, it’s true, was irresistibly bellicose; I knew when I came down here that I might never get back. Why else did I spurn the booking-clerk’s offer of a cheap period return? But I never imagined for one moment – I didn’t dare – that she went in for hand-to-hand combat. Camilla was an intellectual: she did for you with ideas. So I am not saying that I was in the least surprised or disappointed by the absence in her of erotogenic attack. In so far as I had a complaint, it was no more than this: not satisfied with just being a banquet, Camilla insisted on doubling also as her own doorman, major domo, and chief butler, and each of those was determined to out-stickle the others for the punctilios of ceremony. I simply wasn’t allowed to gourmandize in peace. A firm hand guided me – I mean that literally – through all the fine points of etiquette and precedence. I was in trouble if my manners were sloppy, I was bawled out if I rushed or missed a course. Not since I was a boy on a raised chair at the barber’s could I remember my head being so forcibly twisted from one uncomfortable position to another. I must say that I never came away from Camilla’s creaking board hungry, but I never came away without severe external bruising of the pericranium either.

This, however, is mere cavilling. The real misery I suffered, chose to go on suffering, and still suffer willingly today – the real glory of my wretchedness was not caused by this or that physical disappointment or discomfort, it was brought about by the painful, thrilling, irrefragable truth inherent in the very spectacle itself, of the woman I loved laid out as for a ceremonial banquet: CEREMONIAL BANQUETS ARE NOT NORMALLY LAID FOR ONE.