Camilla answered that with only a look. Albeit a pretty murderous look. We were fighting, as might be gathered. What about? Pressure, I suppose. Pressure from me. But I’ll come to that.

I stayed where I was, at the water’s edge, trying to get just one of the smooth stones I’d collected to skim lightly across the surface. My failure to do this was irritating Camilla. ‘Are you trying to kill fish, or what?’ she asked me.

I was glad when she left me alone and went to sit on a cluster of rocks with her book. She was having to re-read Tess of the D’Urbervilles for a new course she was giving, and I ascribed much of her ill-temper to that. She was unapproachable when she read Hardy, more difficult to get along with even than when she was expecting, enduring, or recovering from a period. I’d had to get out of the cottage for a whole week-end when she re-read Jude the Obscure. That, in fact, was the week-end that had put each of us seriously out of sorts with the other. I’d borrowed her car and driven up to Finchley to see how things were going with my delinquent parents, both of whom, but separately, were lobbying me intensely on behalf of the Flatmans – both of whom, but separately, were anxious for me to prove that my long exile was not because of them. It turned out to be an unusual week-end.

I had read about tug-of-love children in the newspapers, but I had never supposed that at the age of thirty I would be one of them. ‘You really must stay with us,’ my father and Rabika insisted. ‘What do you want to stay there for?’ my mother and Menashe demanded. ‘Do you want them to think you’re condoning what they’ve done? Your old bed’s made up here.’