It’s a funny thing about families – sometimes you can go for months, years even, without having or needing to have the slightest contact with anyone bearing your name; but at others it seems that you can’t run into a single relative, no matter how distant, without all the others suddenly descending upon you. It’s like a contagion; be as foolish as to write to an uncle and you will immediately hear from all of your cousins; wave at an aunt and you will at once be dropped in on by people you’ve only ever seen at weddings. If you happen to like the warm smell of the litter, all well and good. But if you don’t you are well advised to avoid all contact. At least that was Camilla’s advice to me. That was one of the reasons she had marooned herself down here of course, in a cottage that was five sizes too small for her – to get as far away as she could from her crowd. ‘I don’t like myself enough to like my family,’ she used to say. ‘And I like myself even less when I see them.’

Well her words weren’t wasted on me. I have never relished looking too hard at where I’ve come from. That visit home I’ve just described was uncharacteristic. It was the consequence of being under enormous pressure. And needless to say it didn’t do me any good. I came back in a state resembling shell-shock. And what did I find when I returned but a message from my cousin Bernice, informing us that she was coming down from Liverpool for the weekend and wondering whether she might stay with us. See.

‘All right with you, Sharon?’ I asked. That wasn’t meant to be a question that had much depth in it. It was simply basic domestic good manners. But I should have seen that Sharon was looking menacingly arch.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I really don’t know.’

‘Why don’t you know? We’ll put her in the spare room. You don’t even have to talk to her. Leave her to me.’

‘But that’s just it. I’m not sure that I ought to leave you alone with her. Hardy couldn’t keep his hands off his cousins.’

She was eyeing me cautiously as she spoke. She wasn’t certain how I was going to take her little jeu d’esprit, or even whether that was what it was. She had a word for me when I was irate. It was huffy. She was wondering whether I was going to get huffy. But if she’d known where I’d spent the afternoon she wouldn’t have worried. She was aware that visits to the scene of my incunabula took all the huff out of me.