I know very well that I ought to have been grateful that she had decided to speak to me at all. I know – I would be a fool if I didn’t– that I ought to have been relieved to have got off so lightly, with so little in the way of recrimination and reprisal. It could, after all, very easily have been a week in the polyester bag for me. And I recognize that even if I was lost to diplomacy, good taste should have prevailed upon me to lie low and say nothing for a while. But what’s gratitude and relief, what’s diplomacy, what’s good taste for Christ’s sake, when curiosity will have its way? It was all very well for me to be told what I’d better not do again, but if we are going to enter into a discussion about doing, then what about her – what had she done? I hadn’t seen Tarquin since he had turned and smiled at me on the stairs, but even if I had I wouldn’t have asked him. It was from Camilla that I wanted to hear it. And preferably in the dark. ‘Tell me,’ I dared her over breakfast. ‘Tell me,’ my eyes implored her whenever we passed, even in the corridors of her school. ‘Tell me,’ I begged her in the kitchen and in the garden and in the bed. But she invariably shook her head and went on with whatever she was doing. One morning I contrived to surprise her by leaving the cottage when she wasn’t looking and ringing her from the village phone box – the one whose colour the National Trust was thinking about changing, so that it shouldn’t be so conspicuous. ‘Tell me,’ I said in an assumed voice when she lifted the receiver, but she simply told me I had the wrong number and hung up. I made one final effort to change my intonation, to rid my plea of its terrible urgency. ‘I wondered if you’d be prepared to tell me,’ I whispered into her ear in the dead of night, casually and just by the by, as if I wished to sound out her views on late Kierkegaard. ‘Bugger off, Barney,’ she whispered back, still fast asleep.

But at least she remembered who I was.

[4]