I went on talking, all the while looking out of the window, not daring to meet the expressions on the faces of those who were bread and butter to Camilla. From where we were situated, in this once Methodistical church hall, high up in the old part of the village, I could just see a triangle of blue Atlantic and the cliffs describing their characteristic upward arc before they fell suddenly away. I liked the way there had never been any compact made here between land and sea. The water simply got in wherever it could and the cliffs looked the other way, poised apparently to soar skywards. But I hadn’t been here as long then as I have been now, and I liked lots of things. I was even capable of finding the wind bracing. I hadn’t yet acquired that appearance, native to local trees and shrubs and long-term inhabitants, of having been blown backwards at an angle of forty-five degrees to one’s natural self by the unremitting blast.

Suddenly – I had been daydreaming even as I rattled on – Camilla breezed in. The train bearing the famous Sri Lankan expert on West Country folklore in general and Hardy’s place names in particular had arrived earlier than expected. She had brought him back and shown him to his room and left him to bore the locals with his explanations of what everything in their village really meant. And now here she was, looking harassed but bright, and wondering how we were getting on. I prepared her a watered down version of what I’d been saying, as she surveyed the care-worn faces ranged before her, and I warned myself not to be surprised if she sent me back, there and then to scrape off more mould from the walls of the communal toilets.

‘I have just been discussing with your charges,’ I said, ‘the way Elfride initially loves and then tires of Stephen’s docility and gentleness, preferring at last to be led “like a colt in a halter” by the more forceful Knight who knows how to make a woman feel like a woman. I was just quoting the dreadful line – perhaps you remember it? – “Directly domineering ceases in the man –”’

‘“– snubbing begins in the woman”, of course. And I take it that you were also about to quote, “Decisive action is seen by appreciative minds to be frequently objectless, and sometimes fatal; but decision, however suicidal, has more charm for a woman than the most unequivocal Fabian success”?’

‘Of course I was,’ I said.

‘And I take it that you were about to go on to explain that what lies behind this nonsense about the female craving submission is Hardy’s pathological fear that women want nothing so much as to be tamed which is the same as his pathological certainty that he doesn’t have what it takes so to tame them?’

‘Of course I was,’ I said.