No one who knows the transfixing, utterly mesmeric power of jealousy would ask that question. Nor would anyone who knows Castle Boterel. Go? Go from here? The smallest and least tenuous of those spiders with whom I shared the floor had a better chance of making it up the greased sides of Marat’s bath than I had of clambering out of this natural wind-blown basin of morbidity. The village lanes ran down, not up. The close enfolding hills enfolded me. The sudden squalls, capable of whipping half the slates off a roof, even at the height of summer, identically matched my weekend tantrums – each of us knew how the other felt; there was nothing either of us needed to be taught about unfocussed fury. And when the blow-hole blew its watery raspberries, it blew on my behalf. Does this sound suspiciously like an affection I am describing, a sympathy based on mutual and corresponding interests? Well, why not? Rural life never speaks more poetically than when it addresses an obsessed or broken spirit. Rocked and wrapped around by it in my misery, I actually fell in love with the wretched place!

These penitential morning walks I take began, in fact, at this period, when Camilla was still here. I had less to reprimand myself for then, of course, and they were not the guilt-laden expeditions they are today; but I found a congruence in Nature that surprised me, and I was up early, following the holidaying or honeymooning couples out into the harbour, but not stopping when they did, to grasp each other the moment that they saw the sea, for all the world like the last members of some once vast expeditionary party, struck by the lonely anti-climax of success. I had no success to halt or hinder me. I marched on in the direction pointed out by the bare fingers of slate, past the naked serrations of rock, sliced clean by the wind for a geology lesson, and on to the highest promontory. Here I would pause and sometimes sit, looking back into the village and the rising farms behind it, and down into the harbour from which the waters had receded, leaving the gouged-out sea-bed, the discoloured pools, the tangled mess of vegetation resembling lettuce and cooked spinach, and the boulders tossed in total disregard of form and symmetry – a natural dereliction, just like me.

Then I would rise and start to climb in the direction that Camilla might take, and I would wonder if this was the day I was going to be vouchsafed an aerial view of her, flat on her back on a shingle beach, forehead to forehead with one of her mackerel-smelling friends, the two of them (and me made three) engrossed in the endlessly shocking phenomenon of penetration.

Stonehenge had not cured me of that?