‘Look,’ I said, ‘what I’m suggesting is that complicity in your own cuckoldry is a recurring theme in Hardy.’ That straightened a few old backs. ‘Over twenty years and a dozen novels later his hero is still none the wiser and continues to make a present of his felicity on a handshake. “Richard Phillotson, I’d like you to make the acquaintance of my cousin Sue Bridehead.” Only now it doesn’t matter quite so much. Hardy is older. Moule and Tryphena have long gone. And no one is likely to take Emma Lavinia away from him, worse luck. So Phillotson isn’t required to be a potent threat. True, there is the question of his extreme repugnance of person, that something-or-other vile about him that Sue jumps from the window rather than confront; but that is only Hardy rubbing at a spot that is no longer sore. “What is it you don’t like in him?” the Widow Edlin enquires. ‘Did you ever tell Jude what it was?” “Never,” Sue replies. Never? Since when was anyone in a Hardy novel delicate? If there was ever going to be any meat in Phillotson’s mystery Hardy would have clouted Jude over the ear with it, as a stimulus, just as Arabella, for a similar purpose, had pelted him with the pizzle of a pig. As it is – left dangling – the schoolmaster’s secret is a gothic not a psychological horror. The structure of Jude the Obscure might be wholly prurient – has she yet? will she now? – but it lacks the grand conceptual salaciousness of earlier books.’

I stopped to spell salaciousness for a poor pensioner who had scraped together the last of her savings to get here. I also took the opportunity to light a cigarette but was asked by the class to extinguish it.

‘By comparison,’ I continued, ‘the story of the rivalry between Stephen Smith and his erstwhile friend and patron Henry Knight is conceived in the very morning time of male trepidation, when one’s own sex is all latent threat and odious comparison and the mysteries of the other stretch out before one as invitingly as a meadow laid with mines.’