But later that second afternoon, after I’d come round from a snooze of surfeit on the sofa and found my mother and Menashe hovering over me with concerned looks and expensive bottles of spirits bought duty free in Positano, I caught them out in an act of near unpardonable duplicity. ‘Why don’t you go up to your old bedroom and see what’s waiting for you in your old wardrobe?’ my mother suggested, once we’d had a drink or two, toasting one another, certain absent friends (but not certain others), and the State of Israel. Given Menashe’s generosity to me in the past, to say nothing of his glistening attentiveness to me right now, I expected to find nothing less than a 30,000 piece jig-saw and a big bundle of twenty pound notes waiting for me where I used to hang my school blazer. (And where, incidentally, it still hangs.) Imagine how I felt then, when in the very nick of time, just as I was about to turn the knob of my old wardrobe, the smothered cries of an infant warned me that what was waiting for me was nothing other than Asimova, growing by the minute and borrowed for the afternoon (I didn’t believe Sharon was in there with her) in order to soften the conscience and break the heart of the man who would not let her call him daddy. I didn’t stop to wonder how long she’d been in the wardrobe. I was down those stairs, into that car, and on to that motorway, quicker than if I’d been Camilla’s brother.

I drove home – was not Castle Boterel my only home now? – at breakneck speed, thankful at least for my new motoring gloves and trying to calculate as I went Camilla’s likely progress with Jude, the obscure boy who had got me into this. I didn’t think it would be all over with him by the time I got back – the letter killeth, but not that quickly – but I reckoned, computing at a generous number of pages to the mile, that it would be close, that with a bit of luck she would be round about the place, give or take a groan, where the dying Jude interweaves the words of Job with the cheers of the naturally unfeeling Oxford undergraduates. But instead of finding her almost finished when I came screeching into the driveway and honked my horn, instead of finding her hunched over her desk, bleary eyed but pleased to see me back safe and early, I found the book tossed into a corner, open at page three, and her, Camilla, out.