So you can see that I wouldn’t have been much of a husband had I left the Harry Vilbert conversation where it was. ‘On further consideration,’ I said, a little later, ‘I think you should see to the dip and I’ll take my clothes off.’

‘You’ll do what?’

‘You know what I mean – I’ll expose myself to Harry.’

She looked at me rather strangely, but she let it go at that. As she’d said, she really didn’t give a fig who did what.

I, however – and this is a critical moment for my honesty – I, however, did. I’m not going to say that her prompt accession to my change of mind disgruntled me, but I will admit that I immediately experienced a drop of spirits akin to that of disappointment. I had been dreading for a long time what Sharon was going to do to me; could it be that I was also dreading that she wasn’t going to do a blessed thing? It was right and proper that I protect her from herself and insist that she be the one to take around the dip. But I felt hollow inside. It might have been nice, that’s to say exciting, that’s to say frightening – it might have been something if she’d taken off her clothes under hypnosis and utterly disgraced me at last.

[3]

Along with the musk melon breasts and the tussock of glistering black hairs which curled up to her navel and which could, on a languorous day, be combed two-thirds of the way down to her knees, Sharon had inherited from her mother a taste for that Middle-Eastern Pastiche Baroque in domestic decoration which can be found, in Western Europe anyway, only in Manchester, North London, Solihull and Leeds. Even after five years of sleeping in it I was still not entirely free of the sensation, whenever I entered my bedroom, that I had strayed into a musical comedy stage-set for a pasha’s pavilion; and it is the case that when the Finchley Amateur Operatic Society put on The Desert Song they asked if they could borrow some of Sharon’s furniture. But it was nonetheless here, beneath a canopy padded, studded, and festooned, that the Fugleman marriage nightly reaffirmed its sacred vows and promises, and it was here, a few hours after I’d explained to Sharon why nothing was amazing, that I first began to shape the idea – the fear, the wish, the proposal and the prohibition, as yet the merest exhalation of dread-hope – that was ultimately to make of those vows and promises, in Sharon’s words, ‘a mockery’, and in Sharon’s mother’s, ‘a laughing stock’.

It was Sharon, however, as I clearly recall, who started it.

‘When you were that Tommy or Thomas or whatever his name was,’ she said, ‘how excited were you by the woman you saw hanging?’