Whatever Camilla’s motives, the effect of her campaign was to change things between us. Eventually my anxiety, making me watchful and tense and guilty, diminished the pleasure I’d been taking ever since I’d known Camilla in all the vigorous daily misery she could cause me. I couldn’t flinch in peace. I couldn’t tremble over her body in the mornings with the old disregard to dignity and pride. I started to feel bad about the whole way I’d behaved towards her. I realised that all along I’d been thinking only about my own gratification and had given – could give – precious little in return. I began to feel sorry for her, and once I felt sorry for her I couldn’t possibly fear her. For her part, it is my opinion that she was actually grateful for a period of non-belligerence in which she could take a break from the gruelling, punishing business of striking terror into my heart. She seemed to be perfectly content about not spreading herself as a banquet every morning also. By invisible degrees all obscenity slipped clean away from her organs and from mine. It was as though there were some tacit agreement in the air between us that as long as I didn’t complain that she was no longer putting the fear of God into me, she wouldn’t complain that I was putting nothing into her. To reflect this alteration in our inner lives, our social habits changed also. We began to talk to each other again but we whispered less. We took more walks. We didn’t drink so much. We shopped more often than we ever had, looking for unusual cheeses and spiced cooked meats – which wasn’t easy – in Plymouth and Exeter and Truro. We found new furniture for Camilla’s cottage. We found a new and yet more derelict cottage. Imperceptibly we drifted into that phase known to all lovers who stay together long enough as domestic harmony.

Time passed. We lay side by side in our new bed – the kind that stops either party rolling into the middle – flat on our backs, rigid, staring up at the beams that were even older and prettier and wetter than the last ones, our bodies safely but fondly separated, neither one daring to lay an inflammable finger on the other. A pair of deprived algolagniacs (don’t bother to deny it, Camilla), two masochists on a mattress, each having to abjure the thrill that can only come from thrall, the incomparable rapture of rough capture, the unslakable thirst to come off worst. (Don’t deny it, Camilla. You sought appropriation to the other sex. The itch for the switch was on you as well.) Until, like so many before us, we decided that since we were already getting nothing of what we really wanted, we might as well get married too.

Chapter VII

CHAPTER VII

‘HERE’S TO BARNEY and Sharon!’