This was a reference to the deal we’d struck that I’d keep her company in the winter and keep the school clean in the summer if she’d keep me clothed all the year round. Camilla had shaken hands on that but accused me ever after of battening on her, even though I kept my part of the bargain and wasted the prime of my life on my hands and knees swabbing out toilets and trying to hold back the Cornish damp with coat upon coat of paint and artex and every anti-fungus solution on the market. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d never slept – she’d still have called me a bum. She badly needed a man to resent. And on a daily basis. It was the only conventionality in her nature. That and the desire to wear a little gold engagement ring with a pretty diamond on her second finger. Every two or three years, despite the fierce independence of her character, she’d find another husband and accept another ring. In some remote corner of her there nestled a sweet prosaic wife and homemaker. She just wasn’t happy unless she was unhappily married.

And as for me, I suppose I was getting what I wanted also. I accepted the unfairness of her treatment of me almost without demur. I was carrying a massive burden of guilt, remember. I had a lot of making up to do. I might not have been the thing Camilla accused me of being but I had been all sorts of other bad things in my time. It all evened out in the long run.

‘I won’t treat them badly,’ I assured her. ‘I’ll give them a good time.’

‘Yes, well don’t give them too much of a good time,’ she cautioned me. She could be very difficult to please.

So could the paying pupils of her summer school. I grew quite anxious when I saw two or three of them taking notes. They were writing down what Hardy had said to Horace and Tryphena. ‘That’s only speculation, of course,’ I laughed. ‘I mean there’s no hard evidence that he ever did introduce his cousin to his friend. Indeed, if he was fascinated, in the way I have intimated, by what such an introduction could lead to, then he might well have decided it was best all round to keep the pair apart. After all, if he wanted that kind of excitement he didn’t have to live it. He was a novelist. He could always write about it.’