But later I returned to Hardy’s picture. ‘Not really surprising,’ I said, ‘when you look at him, that he pushed to the front of that crowd and stared his eyeballs out when Martha Brown did the decent thing and swung half-way round and back again in the rain. Little beggars can’t be choosers. Who else, Sharon, was going to grant such an unpromising lad such an uninterrupted exhibition of herself?’

Sharon was sitting at her dressing table searching for hairs in her chin – it was the one area from which we agreed she could uproot. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘A mannequin for a mannikin,’ she laughed. It was the kind of crack I ought to have been making, and it shows how far, when it came to the Martha Brown business, our usual roles were reversed.

‘A mannequin in articulo mortis, what’s more,’ I reminded her, although I knew she hadn’t forgotten. Ever since I had whispered in Sharon’s ear that it excited me to think of her performing, thinly clad like Martha Brown, before an audience of thousands, she had steered clear of the subject. The Hardy that got his kicks looking at suspended female corpses was simply not the Hardy that Sharon insisted she was proud of me for having been. And although I insisted in return that any other Hardy was entirely of her own making, I happened secretly not to be too put out by that particular instance of his morbidity. I am not saying that I liked it, simply that I didn’t see how I could pretend to a dainty stomach when I didn’t have one. It was altogether too easy for me to remember the deprivations of my own seemingly interminable adolescence, and the avidity with which I seized upon anything that would help to satisfy my curiosity about the female body: emergency posters showing native women with elephantiasis and distended bellies and skeletal babies at their breasts (their breasts!), photographs of mutilated concentration camp victims torn out of Monty Frankel’s copy of The Scourge of the Swastika, an epileptic girl who had dropped down in a dead faint in the school playground – you took whatever you could get. You weren’t in any position to insist that what excited you should be living, let alone in rude health. And to be fair to Martha Brown and all who stared at her, she enjoyed at least two distinct advantages over my staple stimulants: she was, by all accounts, good looking, and she moved.