Against the charge that I was seeing phantoms and defending myself unnecessarily, I will not unnecessarily defend myself. This is love I’m describing, not reason. And my subject is Camilla as a banquet. Would that the whole camp, foot soldiers and all, had tasted her sweet body, love puts it into Othello’s mind half to dread, half to hope; but nobody leaps onto the stage to complain that Desdemona is too diminutive to go round. And Desdemona wouldn’t have been half Camilla’s size. I have seen men in thrall to anorexic midgets, similarly wracked, their lives made a perpetual torment by the belief that a press of hungry rivals cannot wait to sink its teeth into the lean meat of their felicity. What does one do? Tell them that they’re imagining things? How will they be able to keep their own appetites keen then? Competition – fierce, unhealthy competition – is as necessary to possessive love as guilt and jealousy are to good adultery. Consider, without going into the usual politics of how they got there, the last couple left on earth: what better reason for cherishing a mutual passion would they have (ruling out philanthropy) than the first? Adam’s and Eve’s is no one’s idea of a moving love story, and if it ever can be said to develop erotic interest, it is only when they prick their ears to a third party, rustling in the grass. For one obvious reason neither the Garden of Eden nor the Plain of Armageddon provides the right environment for romance – each lacks the necessary piquancy of populousness.

Romantic lovers: Thank the snake.

Oh, and ban the Bomb.

[2]

‘One day,’ I said to Camilla as we were walking along the beach at Stratleigh, she with her jeans rolled up, despite the cold, enjoying the water on her legs, me in a less harmonious frame of mind, tossing pebbles back into the sea – ‘One day, someone, and preferably not another Shakespeare (we know what he thinks), should tell the story of what would have happened to Othello if he’d had his dread/wish granted.’ I didn’t need to explain to Camilla what I meant; we knew each other’s thoughts well now, and she had heard me before on the subject of feeding the love of one’s life to one’s troops.

‘Yes,’ she said, without even stopping to think about it, ‘from Desdemona’s point of view.’

I smelt trouble instantly. ‘What’s the difference?’ I wanted to know. ‘Wouldn’t they all be getting roughly the same thing out of it?’

‘No, Barney, not necessarily. Contrary to your idea of what all women are busting to do if only men as magnanimous as you would let them, it’s just possible that Desdemona wouldn’t get anything out of it at all. It’s also possible that she’d resent the pressure.’

‘Pressure?’

‘Pressure.’

‘Well there’s gratitude.’