It’s possible that she wanted nothing other than to hear some French – I’ve said that she had a gaudy streak, and there’s no denying that you can get pretty sick of the Cornish dialect down here. It’s also possible that she simply wanted a laugh. A laugh? Yes, well that’s what I thought too. But I have to say that The 120 Days of Sodom gave Camilla more amusement than any other book I’d seen her read. Don’t ask me where she got it; as far as I was aware it was an imprisonable offence just to have heard of such a work. I distinctly remembered Sharon explaining to one of her regular customers that she didn’t dare try stocking de Sade, that none of his novels were allowed into England because they gave too accurate a description of the average English civil servant’s leisure time activities. Well, Camilla didn’t agree with her on availability or subject matter. ‘God!’ she exclaimed one night, some few weeks after I was almost drowned on Stratleigh beach – it was about three in the morning and I was already wide awake, unable to sleep for her wild laughter – ‘You’ve got to like him. It’s so different from English filth. He’s so preposterous!’

I rolled over and tried to stuff the pillows into my ears, but I was wasting my time. The bed shook beneath her appreciation, and the ancient timbers of the cottage creaked like a galleon’s. Camilla’s laughter was an invariably reliable gauge of our relations; the louder it was, the worse they were. Tonight there would have been few people sleeping from Pennycrocker to Penzance.

I took advantage of her having to go to the bathroom and stole a glance at what she’d been reading. She was away longer than I expected, washing her hair. ‘Jesus, Camilla,’ I said when she got back into bed, a towel around her head like a turban, ‘it’s all about …’

‘I know,’ she said, beginning to laugh again.

‘And when they’re not eating that, they’re …’

‘I know,’ she said.

‘There’s a bloke here that fucks the nostrils of a goat.’ I don’t know why I sounded so outraged; I had no special feeling for farmyard animals.

Camilla clutched her stomach. Her towel had unwound itself and hung over her heaving shoulders. ‘You mustn’t forget that while that’s happening the goat is licking his balls, somebody else is whipping his arse, and a fourth party is …’