I have to say that I enjoyed planting my towel on the rocks and taking my last swim in the harbour. I did throw myself into that; I meant it; it was, in its way, a true little death. But it was good to be like that new New John Fowles novel you’ve ranted so vehemently against, and to give myself an alternative ending.

Camilla.

I’m relieved to be able to transcribe that document and get it out of my system. I never liked it. It gave me quite a lot of pleasure to starve the cats and watch the plants die. And if I do open up Camilla’s old establishment I won’t be selling Lionel Turnbull alias Lance Tourney’s pamphlet in the shop; and I definitely won’t be selling any Barthes, Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute or John Fowles either. I’ve squared up to melodrama in my time – I used to give it to the Brontës where it really hurt – I won’t lie down to modernism without a fight.

Chapter X

CHAPTER X

WELL, I’VE DONE it. I’ve finally made it out of Lyonnesse. I’m writing this on my old desk in Finchley, the very one at which, over twenty years ago, I used to sit and do my homework and hunt for prepositions. Ostensibly, it was a barrage of phone calls from my mother and Menashe, demanding that I come to see them on a matter not only strange but urgent, and a similar battery from Rabika and my father – the first phone call my father has ever made to me, incidentally – that prised me out. But of course I wouldn’t have come unless I was ready.