‘Sharon, that is a statement entirely about the art. It happened to be the only thing he ever wrote about.’ And as that was not a statement that was meant to broaden the base of our discussion, I left her to do with it what she wanted and busied myself in the kitchen, preparing another wet towel to put over my eyes. I had a feeling that what I really needed was a poultice, but I was not sure what it was or how one made it.

I knew Sharon was not going to give in to me easily on this issue. Like all girls who had been good at English at school and had left when they were sixteen, she had not got beyond being taught to read a book as if it was only the thing it said it was. She had been sent out into the world of words quite unprepared, without any warnings about the wicked ways of writers; and consequently she would stop to take a sweet from any of them. ‘Books are dangerous things,’ I used to tell her. ‘Selling them is one thing, but the minute you open a page you have to keep your wits about you.’ ‘Oh, I just read for pleasure,’ she’d reply, as if a person might submit to assault and battery for the fun of it. In other words, she was in the perfect condition to fall for Thomas Hardy, and I know that she turned to him whenever I was away from home or, as she thought, too preoccupied to notice. I also knew that she had gone off with her mother, only the other day and for the fifth time that year, to watch Alan Bates puncturing sheep and putting out fires and hanging on patiently for Julie Christie; and I had no reason to doubt that she had experienced Julie’s dilemma no less keenly than on her four previous visits, when first Peter Finch fixed her with his demented stare and then Terence Stamp flashed her his sword in the hollow amid the ferns. Aflame to the very hollows of her feet? She should say so. Name a hollow, she was aflame there. I wasn’t therefore totally surprised when I discovered, later that evening, that she had prepared us an elegant supper, dressed herself in something shorter than usual, and set the table for three.

‘Who are we expecting?’ I was nonetheless determined to ask.

‘Nobody. We’re all here.’

She had even chilled champagne.

I wasn’t having it. ‘Sharon,’ I said, ‘don’t be an arsehole.’

She smiled longingly at me over her bubbling glass. I noticed that she was wearing her hair like Julie Christie’s. ‘Tommy wouldn’t speak to me like that,’ she said, already half-drunk on the mere smell of grapes. ‘Tommy was mad about women.’