But I wasn’t, of course, if only as a consequence of this very conversation. I didn’t say a wrong word to Bernice, naturally, over the weekend, and I didn’t lay a wrong hand upon her either; but I felt that I at any time might, that I could, that I – how can I say this? – that I should. I felt it in my bones that it was just possible that she wouldn’t repulse me, or that she would at the very least understand what I meant if I suddenly jumped her and whispered in her ear, ‘Don’t be alarmed, it’s quite all right, it’s only family.’

I didn’t desire her at all – she was, as I had described her to Sharon, short with a moustache – and I don’t think I even liked her very much, although she turned out to be good company, making us laugh with her imitations of the staff in the sociology faculty and forcing us to attend seriously when she described her uphill struggle to get herself elected as the first woman president of the University Jewish Society; but on the night after she left I stirred in a dream, I murmured and whimpered, I made low cooing noises in the back of my throat and straddled the soft pliant body next to me. With subtly charged finger tips I stroked hair and traced the outline of eye and cheek and nostril; but when I felt for the moustache and found only the smooth lip of Sharon I woke with a cry and was desolate.

‘There’s no point in ever beginning to put your mind to that sort of thing,’ Camilla used to say. ‘You’ve just got to face it – the minute your head hits the pillow, anything can happen.’

She had terrible nights herself. Most of the time she wouldn’t tell me what had been going on. She would simply jump out of bed and plunge into a hot bath. It didn’t make any difference if it was four in the morning. She’d even shampoo her hair. Occasionally, if I was awake, I would hear her muttering to herself between submersions. ‘That bloody father of mine,’ she would say. ‘Jesus!’

As for me, I too tried never to be surprised by the promiscuity and fickleness of my unconscious. I was familiar with its ways; I knew how capable it was of picking up any old thing for the night and not even recognizing it in the street the following day. So Bernice was not a problem. A solitary swallow didn’t make a summer, and it took more than one cousin to constitute a complex.

No, Bernice had nothing to answer for. And neither, come to that, had Tryphena Sparks. The real cause of the trouble – or let’s rather say its precipitator, since there was already trouble about – was Horace Moule.

[4]