Candy wasn’t Max Loveday’s only problem either. He had been an academic, teaching French Literature (Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, the text as lexical surface – that sort of thing) to admiring students at one or other of the Scottish Universities, until he had fallen in love with the wife of his professor, or was it until the wife of his professor had fallen in love with him. I’m not entirely certain how it went – Camilla had the details – but it resulted, anyway, in the pair of them making a run for it in a hired furniture van containing, among other things, a grand piano, a hundred tea chests of books, and three of the professor’s children. Castle Boterel was the haven their caravan finally came to rest in, and since there was no university specialising in Nathalie Sarraute hereabouts they bought the Rock Shop. By the time Max Loveday discovered that he wasn’t all that keen on the professor’s wife – or it might have been the professor’s wife who discovered she was not all that keen on him – it was too late for either of them to do anything about it. They were well and truly at the mercy now of all the paraphernalia, all the actual and emotional clutter that illicit bliss collects once it finds a home.

There’s a peculiar bitterness that settles on absconding lovers who are not caught and brought back but are allowed to find their isolated cottage with ivy growing round its windows, a room big enough to accommodate a grand piano, and a little garden running down to the sea. The prompt provision of an earthly paradise seems to intrude into the romantic drama of their lives as cruelly as a deus ex machina intrudes into the willing suspense of a theatre audience, leaving them feeling cheated, disgruntled, and dissatisfied.

We get to see a lot of that sort of thing down here. It can have quite a marked mercurial effect upon the property market – and that’s only one of the disadvantages of living at the end of other men’s rainbows. All right, Camilla – of other women’s also.