‘I don’t think you need to worry about Bernice,’ was all I mildly said. ‘She’s short and squat and ironical with a hooked nose and moustache.’

‘Darling, so are you,’ Sharon brightly returned. She was relieved to find me sparky. That was the word she used for when I wasn’t huffy.

‘All the more cause for you to trust us, my dear,’ I said. ‘As you well know, like to like has never been my bag. That’s just another of the ways in which your friend and I differ. What’s more, I thought his cousins in fact turned out to be his sisters or his nieces or such like. I thought that was the subterranean reason he fell for them. Wasn’t that why they had to keep pulling him off?’

‘Pulling him off?’

‘Dragging him away. Wasn’t there an aunty or someone who had to interpose herself bodily between young Thomas and anything faintly resembling a cousin, because they weren’t cousins at all but illegitimate daughters of illegitimate sisters of illegitimate mothers and therefore in the Devil knows what relation to one another?’

‘I don’t think things were quite so confused as that,’ Sharon corrected me. I got the impression that she didn’t want to niggle; but only wanted to be fair. I detected just a touch of that exasperation in her that experts always feel towards critics. ‘Accounts vary, of course, but it does look as though the one he was keenest on longest, Tryphena, might have been too closely related to him for them to marry.’

‘Might have been? Sharon, you can bet your last farthing on it. Do you think he would have stayed keen on her for long – he who only wanted what eluded him – if he hadn’t recognized her to be a forbidden little fruit dangling from a rotten family tree?’

‘Well it’s true he found the type sympathetic.’

I waved away the word sympathetic. ‘Sharon, she fed his deepest fantasies.’

‘I don’t know how you come to be so well informed,’ Sharon said, before she realised that she shouldn’t.

It was my turn to twinkle. ‘Don’t you?’

For a second or two she looked at me and I looked at her and we each wondered who was going to be the first to accuse the other of having it both ways.

But it was Sharon, finally, who said, ‘Well so far not much evidence has come to light of what Hardy felt about Tryphena or of what Tryphena felt about Hardy or of what they did together. Beyond that they went boating in Weymouth Bay.’