THIS MORNING LANCE Tourney caught me looking at him on the rocks and waved to me. I immediately went for a stiff walk. After that I came back here and put in a couple of hours going through more of Camilla’s papers. Then – I suppose as a consequence of such obvious and potent associations (I don’t just mean the cliffs and the wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, I also mean the morning spent virtually spying) – I sat and leafed through some photographs of Hardy that Camilla had ripped from old copies of the novels and stapled together. This hadn’t been a labour of love; Camilla, I ought to make it clear, hated Hardy even more thoroughly than I did. She once thrust these photographs under my nose and flicked them, in the way that children flick the pages of a book that have a moving cartoon character drawn on them, except that in this case, as I pointed out to Camilla, nothing moved. ‘Precisely,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’m showing you – inanimation.’

But she had another reason for collecting the photographs. ‘What do you see?’ she once asked me, as we looked at them together.

‘I see a miserable old shit,’ I said.

That sort of remark irritated Camilla. She had no time for detestations that were not grounded in keen observation. It was a point of fierce intellectual pride with her to know the objective causes of her antipathies. ‘You can do better than that,’ she said. ‘Look at his face – what do you see in it?’

I mentioned the drooping moustaches and the weary eyes and the general sag of disappointment.

‘Fancy dress,’ said Camilla. ‘Mere muscular imposturings. You’re just describing the man’s idea of himself. What you should be asking yourself is what that disappointment and those moustaches are there for. What are they hiding?’

I looked again. ‘The lip?’ I ventured.

‘Of course the lip. That’s the one real and uncontrolled feature on his face. The reason why of all the others. The soft, moist, plump, vulnerable vermilion lower lip. Can you imagine what it must have been like for him, having that as a permanent flashing beacon of his uncertain maleness? Not surprising, is it, that he duplicated its expression – “significant flexuousness”, he called it – on every one of those less than masculine heroes of his. Look, look, even in his eighties it’s still there, making a liar out of the tragic philosopher, a hot little protrusion of wet flesh, full of blood and girlish expectancy. So picture it in the heyday of his long delayed and long extended adolescence, while he waited and waited for his virility: how it must have glowed and throbbed, as fresh and as sweet as the skin behind a cherub’s knee, as palpitating and as erubescent as a virgin’s closest secret.’