Serious or not, it was impossible for me to avoid the conclusion that Camilla, also just like Sharon, was waiting for some hidden part of me suddenly and marvellously to reveal itself. And was running out of patience.

Yet I was the one who was accused of exerting pressure!

[4]

The question of the degree of Camilla’s seriousness engaged me more than any other now. Was I really being invited to give vent to the terrible side of my nature, supposing I could find it; or was Camilla simply pulling my leg. I recalled her amusement on the first of her 120 days in Sodom, and her exact words, ‘You’ve got to like him. It’s so different from English filth. He’s so preposterous.’ And I took comfort from those, hoping that the whole thing was just an elaborate tease, a bit of good unclean fun designed to rouse me from my cowardly luxorious subjection, to pay me back for my backward slide into underhanded Hardyishness, a demonstration in itself of the superiority of the preposterous over the surreptitious. But I couldn’t be sure. I lived in constant dread that at any time – and quite against the grain of what I thought we’d hammered out together (what she’d hammered out in me, that is) – I would be called upon to perpetrate some unspeakable act of vileness upon Camilla’s body – involving the nostrils of a goat for all I knew – of which I would be wholly and fatuously incapable. The shadow of Melpomene loomed black and large. Is it any wonder that I quickly resorted to the kind of cruelty I knew best and dashed downstairs with even more urgency every morning to collect the mail, and leapt from my seat like a man with a million guilty secrets every time the phone or door bell rang – on the off-chance that that would just about satisfy Camilla as to pain? I had no other means of keeping myself interesting to her. I was terrified of being rumbled for a fraud. A shrivelled penis in the presence of Melpomene was one thing, but what would Camilla have said had she decided to cower before me and found herself eye to eye with such a puny threat? ‘Ah triple foutredieu,’ she had heard me boast, when the blood flowed freely, ‘je bande!’ Well then, lay on and ‘Bandes-toi!’