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Chapters (27)
  1. Contents
  2. About the Book
  3. About the Author
  4. Also by Howard Jacobson
  5. Dedication
  6. Title Page
  7. Prologue
  8. Part One
  9. Chapter I
  10. Chapter II
  11. Chapter III
  12. Chapter IV
  13. Chapter V
  14. Chapter VI
  15. Chapter VII
  16. Part Two
  17. Chapter I
  18. Chapter II
  19. Chapter III
  20. Chapter IV
  21. Chapter V
  22. Chapter VI
  23. Chapter VII
  24. Chapter VIII
  25. Chapter IX
  26. Chapter X
  27. Copyright

I fixed her though. When Leonard Smith and James Gibson and D.M. Thomas arrived in the village to mark the centenary of Hardy’s original journey from Bockhampton to Castle Boterel1 – a journey which they had just lovingly re-duplicated themselves – I didn’t tell her they were here. I suppose that was a bit tough on them. There can’t be any doubt that after two days of seeing only ghosts, meeting Camilla would have been the highlight of their pilgrimage – even if she wasn’t on the original Hardy itinerary. But I was damned if I was going to contribute to her having a good time after what she’d just said to me. And besides, in the light of those last remarks of hers, and in the light of how badly my gift of Tarquin had gone down, I couldn’t very well show up on Camilla’s doorstep with three strange men, each of them imagining he was Thomas Hardy – could I?

1 See The Thomas Hardy Yearbook (Toucan Press, 1971).

Chapter VI

CHAPTER VI

[1]

TARQUIN APART, CAMILLA had her own reasons for charging me with recidivism. She had first found me interesting – dare I go so far as to say exciting? – when she saw me vilifying Sharon and scaring the living daylights out of Rowland Fitzpiers in scabrous French. Until that moment, in her own words, I had been just another anal-retentive at a Hardy party. What she didn’t say – but what I will now say for her – is that she invited me down to Castle Boterel (or at least didn’t actively dissuade me from coming) in the hope that I would scare the living daylights out of her. I’m absolutely certain she didn’t know precisely how; she was, in fact, incapable of taking any kind of physical pain – she screamed, for example, whenever she brushed her teeth, she bled easily, the pressure of her earrings tortured her, and no matter how obscene she found the drama of penetration she was very precise (the word might even be narrow) about where she was and was not to be considered penetrable. Just in what manner she was therefore going to accommodate an acolyte of the Marquis de Sade’s was a conundrum which I am sure she had not even begun to put her mind to.