I needed air and a glass of water and a long holiday as far away from Dorset as man could go. I also needed to get out of Harry’s basement flat. But I didn’t feel at all resentful of Harry. All my rage was against myself. ‘I’ll tell you what the matter is,’ I said, as soon as I could collect myself. ‘I’ve just finished writing Tess of the Fucking D’Urbervilles!’ – but I didn’t really expect him to have the wit to see what was so terrible about that.

[6]

From Sharon, though, I had looked for something better. ‘So why is that so terrible?’ she asked, when I got home. The woman I loved!

[7]

‘You can ask me that?’

‘You always said you wanted to be a writer.’

‘Sharon, that’s not funny.’

‘You even wore Stendhal shirts when I first met you.’

‘They were Byron shirts. You can’t get Stendhal shirts in London. But what’s that got to do with anything? I never wore Thomas Hardy shirts.’ And my flesh crept, visibly, like Sue Bridehead’s, at the thought of the propinquity.

‘Well, you wouldn’t have minded then if you’d discovered that you’d written The White and The Blue.’

‘Sharon, I wouldn’t mind it now. And it’s The Red and the Black – the white and the blue are the colours of the Israeli flag. But so what? There were never two men more unalike. Stendhal was generous, amusing, urbane, reckless. He wasn’t a morbid superstitious little rustic who confused high peevishness with tragedy, niggardliness with humour, mean naturedness with melancholy, and put it on history, genealogy, blood, evolution and the Prime Mover that he couldn’t get his end away.’

In the circumstances, considering what kind of a morning I’d had, I was reasonably pleased with this little speech. It wasn’t my final word on Hardy – it was too mild for that – but it caught the flavour of my aversion. I was glad I had not descended to insults.

Sharon, however, believed she had caught me out in an impropriety. ‘I thought you didn’t approve of non-textual analyses,’ she said, just as if she had been to university herself. ‘I thought you objected to the importation of irrelevant biographical data.’

I shook my head at her. At another time I might have been filled with husbandly pride. ‘Who’s importing irrelevant biographical data?’ I asked.

‘You. You just said Hardy couldn’t get his end away.’