To convey the extremity of my condition let me tell you that I toyed, for longer than I care to admit, with the notion of having all Camilla’s words printed in a different type-face – in something thin and spectral and wraith-like, in tribute to her rarity and other-worldliness and ventriloquial genius. The only thing that changed my mind was the realization that Camilla herself would have hated it. She didn’t see herself as a wraith. And she loathed every kind of tricksiness. Her preference, in all things, was always for simplicity and directness. As indeed, when I am myself, is mine. This was one of the many fastidiousnesses that united us. Together we were very choosy in our ideas of what constituted good art. We couldn’t stand, in just about equal measure, novels that took an interminable time telling you who was telling the story and how he came by it, both of us being perfectly at home with the convention of invisible omniscient narrators, no matter what people said about the breakdown of social certainty and the consequent necessary fictiveness of fabulists. We had no patience for films that could in any way be described as experimental, enigmatic, or surreal; and we could not abide plays that were about tramps, lunatics, savages without language, the terminally infirm, or the problem of writing plays. When I think of the number of theatres we stormed out of together and the quantity of paperbacks we tossed into the fire to keep us warm in winter, or into the sea to keep us young in spring, my heart aches.

Stuck out here, so far from the civilizing amenities, all efforts to keep in touch with written or spoken English were labours of love. We had to drive for an hour to find an even moderately well-stocked bookshop. If we wanted to see a play in the West End we had to set out early in the morning, leaving food for the cats, messages for the milkman, and the telephone number of the hotel we were staying at in case anyone important to us died while we were away. And yet before ten minutes of the first scene had elapsed we were up out of our seats – often on the front row, sometimes in a box – and into the nearest bar. We weren’t particularly interested in drinking; we just wanted somewhere quiet to sit where we could talk over the insult that had just been delivered to our intelligence. We didn’t just sneer; we discussed and analysed conscientiously. Our conversations on these occasions were almost certainly the best things on anywhere in London.