This – my curiosity, my insistence to be told – was partly what Camilla had in mind when she complained about ‘pressure’ on the beach at Stratleigh. But as I’ve said, she was re-reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles and that alone was enough to account for her filthy mood. All kinds of noises of loathing and contempt came from the little knoll of rocks on which she sat and suffered, while I frolicked in my own fashion at the water’s edge. In the usual way of couples, my spirits lightened as hers grew more depressed. By the time Angel Clare had got around to perhaps putting his mind to maybe thinking about being almost prepared to consider reconsidering his views on Tess’s ‘un-intact state’, on the grounds that she was, when all was said and done, more fucked against than fucking, and Camilla was as a consequence doubled up and terrifying the gasteropods and lamellibranchiates out of their shells with her howls of pain, I was fairly skipping across the beach, as indeed were my pebbles now fairly skipping across the surf.

When I next looked in Camilla’s direction it was to see her back on the beach herself, standing by the water and considering a solitary splash that she’d made, in vain imitation, presumably, of my deft flicks of the wrist.

‘You’ve got to throw low,’ I called out.

‘I did.’

‘You’ve got to really let it go.’

‘I did.’

‘You’ve got to use something very flat and heavyish.’

She was coming towards me and I noticed that she was empty handed.

‘I did,’ she said.

‘What I especially can’t stand about the little shit …’

‘Angel Clare or Hardy?’

Camilla kicked sand at me. ‘Don’t try that one, Barney. You know they’re indistinguishable where it matters.’

There was a time when I would have bridled at this, forcing my features into that expression of concentrated complacency which only clerics or critics can manage, and saying, ‘But Angel Clare, however much he resembles his author, could never have written Tess of the D’Urbervilles.’ But that was an age ago, before life and Camilla had knocked me around. And besides, I wasn’t looking for an argument. I was relieved that we were talking again. That Camilla was back by my side, attacking the beach with her strong toes, covering me with sand. ‘Go on,’ I therefore said, ‘tell me what it is that you can’t stand about the little shit.’