‘Jesus, Camilla,’ I said, with a shudder, ‘you almost make me feel sorry for the poor bastard. Is a man to be held responsible for his lip?’

‘When it’s in that condition he is,’ she answered, without the slightest hesitation. She was just the person to be running a Thomas Hardy summer school.

The only pity is that she isn’t running it now.

Of course I knew nothing of Camilla, had never even heard of her, at the time that Sharon was pressing home her advantage over me. I had to fight all my battles single handed then. And I was losing most of them. Sharon’s impressive numerological revelations, what I can only call her rampant marvellings, had left me in a weakened state. I wasn’t conceding or acknowledging anything, but my confidence in my old incuriosity was shaken and I had no practical resistance to offer as Sharon bombarded me daily with further coincidences and fresh corroborations.

It turned out that she had been sitting, all along and without either of us suspecting it, on a talent for research. She seemed to know how to dig things up; where to go, who to contact. Rare books and pamphlets and Xeroxed articles from obscure periodicals flooded into the house. Professors wrote to her. Visiting scholars dropped by. She held long, mysterious, and I suspected transatlantic conversations on the telephone. And because she knew I wasn’t prepared to sit and listen to her latest findings, she left little pointed snippets of relevant Hardiana for me where I might come upon them accidentally: in my pockets, folded between bank notes in my wallet, underneath my pillow, sellotaped to the flex of my electric razor, wrapped around the handle of my toothbrush. As a consequence I moved about my personal belongings gingerly; I let myself go. I shaved and cleaned my teeth less frequently, I spent no money, and I grew lean. Quite frankly I couldn’t crack an egg for fear of what I’d find inside.