‘It suggests here,’ said Sharon one evening, emboldened by the success of her previous attempt to draw me out on her favourite subject, ‘that he might have introduced his friend Horace Moule to Tryphena and that they might have had a relationship.’

‘I thought we knew that they had a relationship.’

‘No, not Tryphena and Hardy.’

‘Horace Moule and Hardy?’

‘No, Horace Moule and Tryphena. Apparently they were in London at about the same time. While Tryphena was at Stockwell Teachers’ Training College in 1869, Horace Moule would have been in Chambers.’

I was not unfamiliar with the style of scholarship that Sharon was reading. It was of the sort that placed great reliance on the supposition that no two persons known intimately to a third and living in a city of some eight million inhabitants in roughly the same century could be so thoroughly unobliging as not to have met clandestinely on as many occasions as was consistent with the reasonable elucidation of an otherwise inexplicable poem. Especially as such a hot summer as was enjoyed that year – the hottest in living memory – was bound to bririg them into collision in the park; just as the century’s previous wettest of all winters had surely seen to it that they had taken shelter beneath each other’s umbrellas.

But I wasn’t looking to pick a fight with Sharon. She was extravagantly beautiful tonight, opulent and abundant in a tiny dress – a pearl richer than all my tribe. And the desire was hot upon me to give her away. So I went to the only part of the Moule–Tryphena theory that interested me. ‘And what does it say that Hardy might have felt about that?’ I asked.

‘It says he might have been jealous.’

‘It doesn’t say that Hardy might have promoted the relationship for that very reason?’

‘What very reason?’

‘That he might feel jealous.’

‘What kind of reason is that? What would he have wanted to feel jealous for?’

‘Oh Sharon!’

‘Don’t “Oh Sharon!” me. What would he have wanted to feel jealous for?’

‘For the same reason that everybody else does – pleasure.’

‘Pleasure? I don’t get any pleasure out of being jealous.’

‘Yes you do. You just don’t recognize the symptoms. You’ve been trained to call them something else.’

‘Yes – pain.’

‘That’s right. But pain’s just a word.’

‘It’s more than just a word, Barney. On those occasions when you’ve dragged me off a dance floor at a party and called me slut and cut my lip, you were experiencing more than just a word.’

‘Sure. I was experiencing a disreputable thrill.’

‘I see. So Hardy introduced Tryphena to Horace Moule so that he could catch them smooching, cut her lip, and get a thrill?’

‘Hang on. This is all hypothetical. We were talking mights, remember.’

‘But that’s what you would have done if you’d been Hardy?’

‘I might.’