I think it was removing Camilla’s letter from my pocket that really did the trick. I felt lighter instantly. And on three consecutive mornings I skipped my penitential expeditions. Lovely mornings they were, too; bright, crisp, purples prinking the main – absolutely perfect for the gratification of guilt. But I’d been having a few thoughts about guilt. I’d always known that it was a dubious emotion – you couldn’t read Thomas Hardy and not know that remorse was just a grander name for impotence, a spot of exercise for the slack muscles of passivity – but I’d clung to it because it was an emotion that came easily, suited me, went with the way I looked and dressed, and because I feared that without it I’d lose the conviction that the sky had only fallen in on me because I’d pulled. Lose guilt and you lose the illusion of control. I knew all about it; I’d been walking myself into a delirium of guilty responsibility all winter. Camilla’s letter, however, out of its envelope for the first time in months, reminded me that it was pure vanity on my part to suppose that I’d done anything – it had all been done to me. Camilla had left on her own account, not because of me. She would have gone at last, whatever I’d done. She could no more bear the tedium of love than I could. It was her mess just as much as it was mine. Hadn’t she been at war with someone – with Hardy, with the village, with her brother, with her own height (be still, be still my heart) – long before I’d happened by? So what was I doing, poaching guilt? Let her go walk the cliffs – that’s if there were any in whichever structurally symbolic corner of France Max had sequestered her.

I felt bare, finding myself suddenly without remorse – unaccustomed, uncertain, vulnerable even; but I also felt good in a prickly, watchful, spiteful sort of way. So when they wouldn’t stop ringing me and asking me to come up, I couldn’t see any reason not to comply. That’s not meant to sound negative. I was pleased to come, as it happens – but it takes a little time to get used to the idea that you’re the fly and not the wanton boy. It’s my experience, anyway, that you go a little quiet for a while.