There wasn’t any point then, and I don’t suppose there’s any point now, in my saying that I missed her meaning.

[2]

In the weeks that followed this candid exchange of views Camilla became increasingly inaccessible to me. She began to devote more of her time to the Alternative Centre than she used to, actually opening the doors when people knocked on them and accompanying her students on their topographico-literary forays. When she got home tired in the evenings she would prepare herself a light snack – I had to fend entirely for myself – and then go straight to her desk where she would whip up a storm of frenzied intellectual activity, typing and swearing and producing pamphlets at a phenomenal rate. Only once did she let me into what she was working on, and that was because we had company and company made her expansive.

Max Loveday, the mentally turbulent proprietor of The Harbour Rock Shop, who hated his shop, the lettered rock and spun filaments of sugar he served from it, and every other detail of his life in Castle Boterel, came to see us once or twice a week. We were the only people in the village he could talk to who had any understanding of how he felt. He could rely on us not to be so naïve as to ask him why, if his life was so awful and he hated selling lettered rock in Castle Boterel, he didn’t try to change it and go and sell something he liked more in a place that suited him better. Camilla and I knew all about the fatal allure of misery and discomfort, and why a man might choose to pack himself around with the things he most loathes.