It took the police though, not Camilla’s reassurances, to forestall the terrible vengeance demanded by outraged decency and to escort the five frightened flashers safely from the village.

It seems to be doing me some good, forcing myself to remember actual words that Camilla spoke. Her presence has been getting unhealthily generalized and diffused of late, particularly when I’m not walking the cliffs or following the course of rambles that we used to take together deep into the Valency Valley. There has been a touch of Heathcliff about me recently, I fear, that is if someone who is called Barney Fugleman and what’s more looks as if he is called Barney Fugleman can approximate to such a gentile, such a Christian, such an English, such an essentially Cornish spinster’s fantasy. But then why not? Might it not be possible to show, without going so far as to claim Jewish parentage for her Liverpudlian gypsy foundling, that it was precisely someone such as me, swarthy and saturnine and inhospitable and liable to vent my spleen on other people’s pets, that the poor girl dreamed about, my fur coat and Bally shoes notwithstanding, in the back room of that draughty rectory? It’s not out of the question. I’ve stirred the imagination of more than one lonely bookish vicar’s daughter in my time. Either way, it’s a surprise to me how morbid I’ve become. I listen to voices in the wind for God’s sake! I trudge moors. I haunt country graveyards. Dogs I have always wanted to kick and I might myself, at any time, have hung up Isabella Linton’s – the more the worms writhe, and all that – but now, I swear, and this is absolutely uncharacteristic of me, if I knew what an ash tree looked like or where one was to be found I could very easily fall to dashing my head against it.