‘Boating my bum! I’ll tell you what they did together. At the end of every evening she would put on her little bonnet, the one that made her look most like his mother and his grandmother and his aunties and his sisters, and she would strap him firmly – the more she hurt, the better – into that heavy trundling machinery of ancestral curses and family prohibitions and nameless atavistic horrors passed down through a deteriorating lineage, and she would slowly turn the wheel. Sharon, to a genealogical masochist like Thomas Hardy a cousin who was a little more than cousin and therefore less than kind must have been like a personal gift from the President of the Immortals himself.’

Sharon shook her head. ‘Show me your evidence, Barney. There is nothing to suggest that he knew about the circumstances of her birth until the end. That was what broke them up.’

‘And left him cursing fate for ever more?’

‘Well, it would have been a terrible shock. I can see why he might have felt cruelly treated.’

‘By fate?’

‘By something over which he had no control.’

‘Sharon, there’s no such thing. There is no fate. There is only psychological necessity. He would have known what he was letting himself in for the moment he first clapped eyes on Tryphena. They always do, these obsessive backward-travelling voyagers to the sources of themselves. Do you think nothing stirred and twitched in Oedipus – nothing over and above, nothing extra – when he lifted the hem of that older lady’s gown? Hardy knew all right. In that hot secret centre of his psychology, he knew.’

‘And what, in the hot secret centre of your psychology, do you know?’

‘In relation to what?’

‘In relation to your relation.’

‘Bernice? Well I know, or at least I think I know, that she is my cousin and not my mother’s daughter’s sister’s something-else; and I know that even cousinship is consanguinity too much for my taste. I find I am not comfortable with women who in any way resemble me or remind me of my grandparents. I don’t know where to look. Unlike Hardy I feel as if I come from luscious, not from etiolated stock; other members of my family are inclined to make me feel a little sick with surfeit at the best of times. There should never be more than one of us gathered in one room together.’ This wasn’t a very nice thing to be saying, considering where I’d spent the afternoon. You can see why I might feel guilty.

‘So you’re safe with Bernice, is what you’re telling me?’

‘Oh, as houses.’