I’m sure that one of the reasons Max Loveday became our friend was because we didn’t mind it when he yelled abuse at us. Naturally private and reserved though his temperament was – he normally spoke with an infuriating softness, for example, forcing anyone who wanted to hear to incline towards him, and he kept his sad eyes always lowered beneath long and even feminine lashes – nevertheless, the moment the first touch of alcohol passed his lips he would begin ranting at us about Barthes or Lacan or the new flavour of rock the wholesalers were pushing on him. He would exhaust the three of us with his tirades, showering Camilla and me with every kind of calumny and malediction, accusing us of all known crimes against the body and the intellect, not the least of which was our disgusting conspiratorial cosy domesticity. Only then, when he had tried our friendship to the limits, did he settle back for ten minutes into his usual demeanour of polite, arch, and difficult-to-hear disputatiousness, prior to kissing Camilla, shaking hands with me, and going off into the night – not happy exactly, but happier in his unhappiness than he’d been when he arrived.

Tonight, sensing that Camilla and I were not so united as usual and therefore not so blatantly susceptible to the charge of gross togetherness, he raged himself out of self-generating rancour early and was therefore reduced to pacing from one room of the cottage to another, scouring Camilla’s walls and bookshelves for some pretext to vent spleen. Nothing was spared, from Camilla’s old school swimming certificates to dogeared postcards of paintings pinned to kitchen cupboards. ‘Aha! Fans of Vuillard, I see,’ we could hear him jeering, rooms away. ‘You require a linear narrative drive in pictures too, do you? Well, why not. I’m pleased at least that you’re certified to save lives. Who was the last person you saved? Seurat, by the look of it. Pity you bothered.’ We let him rant, filling him up with brandy and talking between ourselves, which wasn’t easy since we weren’t talking. At last – it must have been after midnight – he found something that interested him on Camilla’s desk. He fell silent for five minutes, then, through the walls, we heard his guffaws.

‘What have you found now?’ Camilla called out.

Max came back to where we were sitting, holding out an open book accusingly. It was Florence Hardy’s life of her husband. Max raised a quizzical eyebrow at Camilla, as if to say, ‘You’ve a lot of explaining to do now, good woman.’

What he actually did say was, ‘From what I can see this Florence Emily Hardy writes much like her husband.’ There was a tone of malicious triumph in his voice, as if he’d discovered another cosy domestic conspiracy.

‘That,’ said Camilla, ‘is because she didn’t write it. He did.’

‘He wrote his own biography?’