‘Where did you get this?’ I demanded. I take it that it is not necessary for me to explain that although my name was the only thing written on the envelope, I recognized who had written it. It had never occurred to me that there would be a note. If there was a note then something more frightful than an accident had occurred. That image of myself with my back bent in an unending pilgrimage of guilt flashed once more before my mind’s eye. ‘Who gave it to you, Harry?’ I repeated. I had taken him by the shoulder again, or whatever that was that felt like a bag of walnuts inside his jacket.

He looked even older and closer to the point of expiry than usual. I believed I actually saw him sway. ‘Lionel,’ was all he was able to get out.

‘Lionel?’

‘Lionel Turnbull. He handed it to me this morning … while I was helping you out of the boat.’ He could barely get his breath. But I understand now that he wasn’t at all close to death. It was excitement that he could barely catch his breath for. ‘He told me not to give it to you until I had to. Those were Camilla’s instructions to him.’

‘Hang on, Harry – are you saying that Camilla gave this to Lionel to give to you to give to me, only when you decided that you had to? When was that, Harry? When did you decide you had to? And when did Lionel see Camilla?’

But I got answers to none of these questions. Harry had broken away from me and was back inside the Museum of Nugatory Spells and Superstitions before I could reach out and haul him back. A minute later I saw him watching me from one of the windows, an ashen face peering out from between the plastic toadstools and the painted phalluses, the whites of his eyes flecked with red spots of exhilaration.

I suddenly had the fancy that the rest of the village was similarly engaged, and that there wasn’t a window anywhere that didn’t have at least one face in it. But at the same time I felt that it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. I sank into the grassy verge, along which Camilla and I had strolled hand in hand on countless sunny afternoons, and I tore open my envelope, careless of who saw my suffering now, tears rolling freely down my cheeks on to the single sheet of paper containing Camilla’s final valediction to earthly joys.

Except that – as any fool but me would by now have realised – earthly joys were the last things Camilla had said goodbye to.

[5]