But I knew what his problem was. He was accustomed to looking at photographs of women as victims. The idea of female fragility excited him. When he grew up he would be the sort of man who was transported by the image of Fay Wray in King Kong’s fingers. If he’d been Gulliver he’d have stayed in Lilliput. Whereas I was mad for those Brobdingnagians, those marvellous Maids of Honour who could strip a little chap naked from Top to Toe and lay him at full Length in their Bosoms.

‘Do you know what I’d like Mrs Flatman to do to me if she caught me?’ I asked, making one last effort to bridge our differences. ‘I’d like her to sit me astride one of her nipples.’

It wasn’t my idea, of course; I owed it to another of those resourceful Maids of Honour. But I was sincerely attached to it, as Sam Hall must have noticed. For he made a sudden desperate retching sound, clutched his stomach, and took off from his brick. For a fraction of a second he was actually in the air, some two or three inches from the ground, and foaming slightly at the corners of his mouth. I could even see his neck turning a deep purple. But he still had time to tell me what he thought of me. ‘You’re weird,’ he said. ‘You’re completely weird.’

I watched him swinging on his pyjama cord, changing colour. ‘Me?’ I said. ‘Me weird? So what does that make you?’

But he wasn’t listening. ‘Weird!’ he kept repeating. ‘Weird!’

But I think we were both a bit hard on each other. We weren’t really weird. We were just a couple of ordinary Jewish boys trying to make sense of things. As for me, all I wanted was a ride on Rabika Flatman’s nipple.

Chapter III

CHAPTER III

[1]

FROM THE MOMENT that Sharon hit upon the happy idea of running a specialized rather than a general bookshop, and the even happier one of specializing in books by and about Thomas Hardy – ‘Why shouldn’t I, Barney? I’ve got all the contacts’ – our business affairs took a not inconsiderable turn for the better. She moved premises from Finchley down the road to Hampstead, changed the name from Zazie’s dans le Metro to Eustacia’s on the Heath, and within a few short months was able to boast the largest and most comprehensive collection of Hardiana in the country. In response to the requests and enquiries which soon came in from as far afield as Lima and Osaka and by the bagful from Tasmania she sent out a friendly chatty newsletter, informing customers of fresh acquisitions, advising them as to pressing wants, and including tit bits of Hardy gossip culled from conversations in her showrooms with visiting Hardy cognoscenti.