There was no question in her own mind that all this activity gave a fillip both to her intellectual life and to her self-esteem as a woman. Whole days on end went by now, for example, without her remembering that she had never been to university. New acquaintances, completely unaware of my existence and never having known my wife when she was just good old sporty Sharon, called her softly by the name above her shopfront, and a leading women’s magazine, in its Christmas issue, picked Eustacia Fugleman as one of the ten women in London under thirty most likely to go places in 1968. Sharon was especially thrilled by that prediction because of all the numbers in it.

But she was, withal, subject to one marring sadness: it pained her that she was not allowed to voice that retrospective wifely pride – that special connection she enjoyed with every volume on her shelves – which was so much more the reason for her success, she always maintained, than anything as humdrum as business acumen. I had extracted a vow of silence from her about all that, and difficult though she found it, she respected it.

‘Can’t I even tell my mother?’ she asked me.

I shook my head.

‘Never?’

I took my time replying. ‘Not yet. Not until I find out.’

‘But what more is there to find out?’

I took my time replying to this also. I had to go very carefully these days. On top of everything else I was having bad dreams. Only the night before I had stood in the darkness beneath the primeval yews and oaks and watched while Alec D’Urberville traced his coarse pattern on Tess’s beautiful feminine tissue, as sensitive as gossamer, practically as blank as snow, only it wasn’t Tess’s tissue he traced it on but Sharon’s. And on the night before that I had arrived out of breath at the schoolmaster’s window in Marygreen just in time to catch the shadow of Sharon in Sue Bridehead’s nightie as she submitted to Richard Phillotson’s unspeakable embrace. As for the hollow amid the ferns, I knew every blade of grass in it, just as Sharon Everdene knew every thrust of Troy’s scintillating weapon. So you can see why I felt I had to plan my sentences. I knew that if I wasn’t careful I would find myself uttering something like, ‘For pity’s sake, Sharon, don’t you understand? – I Have To Find Out Who I Am!’

In which event I really would have been in trouble.

What I finally said was, ‘I have to find out what is going on,’ but I said it very slowly, leaving plenty of space around each word.