It was unmistakable from the lavishness of Camilla’s spread – a blind vegetarian could not have missed it – that she regarded herself not merely as a morsel for a monarch but as nourishment for a whole line of kings, that she believed her natural abundance obliged her, even against the dictates of her anti-egalitarian politics, to feed the five thousand. And that the five thousand, by the same natural law, owed her something in return. She convinced me of that, utterly, without having to advance a single line of argument. Time and again, as I approached her and looked on the profusion of her flesh – it was a remarkable detail, never lost on me, that her breasts retained their full rotundity, didn’t in the slightest bit subside or spill, when she lay stretched out on her back, and that the springing hairs of her sex (my health can take one more remarkable detail) scorned the usual triangular arrangement favoured by conventional women, climbing instead the slopes of her belly, straggling the soft downs of her thighs, like uncultivated vines – time and again, I say, when I feasted on all this, I felt pity for her, that I was only me, and shame for myself, that I wasn’t a crowd. Naturally I didn’t let on. I wasn’t such a fool as to blubber out an apology. I didn’t drop to my knees (I was usually already on them anyway) and cry, ‘Forgive me, I’m afraid I’ve come on my own again.’ But I knew in my heart, and I suspect Camilla knew I knew, that I was a poor substitute for a party.

Whatever else I loved Camilla for, whatever miraculous conjunction of spirit, word, and flesh, had found its way into my soul, I loved her most intensely for her incontestable right to be loved by others – or to put that another way, for her capacity to loose the devils of rivalry against me. She didn’t even need to whisper in my ear; she had only to stretch herself out to her full length on the bed, precisely as I have just stretched her, for me to feel that adversaries past and present, ghostly and imminent, were coming at me from everywhere. I could hear them thumping up Camilla’s fourteenth-century staircase. I could see them prising out the panes from Camilla’s tiny leaded windows. It was with an exquisite sensation of inadequacy that I drew my weapon afresh each time, certain of nothing but comprehensive defeat. Barney Fugleman – love’s warrior – alone and lightly armed in the continuum.